


The Weary Kind

by Astern



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Addiction, Atonement - Freeform, Betrayal, Brotherhood, Gen, Guerrilla Warfare, Healing, Infiltration, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Redemption, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:01:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 42,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25702501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Astern/pseuds/Astern
Summary: Three days in Seattle. Every step Tommy has taken has led him to this point and every decision he makes in that fateful city will haunt him long after he leaves it. Follow him as he struggles to come to terms with the allegiance he once swore to the people he now hunts, with the betrayal of a redemption he thought he had found, and with the loss of everything he once held dear. -- Consistent with TLOU, TLOU2, and Dirt
Comments: 30
Kudos: 39





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is consistent with the events of TLOU, TLOU2, and the fanfiction story Dirt, also by Astern. Reading Dirt prior to reading this story is recommended, but is not required to understand and enjoy this story.
> 
> The Weary Kind is dedicated to Anne Marie, badass Marketing Director of Dirt.

Prologue

It starts with him on the ground.

He is fully conscious, prone on his stomach. He is not immobile. He is not held down. But he is slow. So terribly slow. Deadly slow. The shadows of the room wrap around him like bitter cold ghosts, deadening his arms and legs, causing his hands and feet to slide uselessly against the icy floor.

He hears the screams too. He never did really, any more than he was conscious, but still he hears the screams now. High-pitched and inhuman. Agonizing. Pleading. Accusatory. The rational part of his mind knows it would not have sounded like that, even if he had heard it, but the rational shrivels like ashes in the wind here, and the ashes fill his mouth and nose and ears until only those shattering screams reverberate in his mind.

The crack of bone he does not need to imagine. He never heard that either, but his mind does not need to invent it. He has heard it many times before. Not like breaking an arm or a leg. Uniquely cranial. A sharp high crunch, the inward collapse of a brittle concave surface, instantly hushed by the wet suck of soft tissue. He never heard it then, but the sound is like a murderous old friend. Replaying once and a thousand times.

Eight faces loom, hers at the center. They laugh. High and unreal. Transformed into inhuman forms, impossibly tall, their faces dark and angular like a garish portrait of what humans might be. They laugh but their lips don’t move. They stop him rising but they don’t touch him. And behind them the club swings up and down and slices the air like a knife in snow.

And there he is at their center. Black hair and gray face, fingers pressed into the tiles outlined in red. The only color is blood. The only life is in the eyes. Expectant. Disappointed. The eyes continue their accusation even after the final blow falls. Even after the light behind them withers.

It starts with him on the ground, and it ends there too.

No closer to his brother.

No closer to Joel.


	2. Chapter 1 - The Only Color

Chapter 1 – The Only Color

** THEN **

_October 12, 2020_

“Look alive, people! Wounded incoming!”

The bellow carried out across the square surrounding the old McLean County Museum of History, echoing across the heads of men and women busy cleaning rifles, counting cartridges, stacking crates of explosives, and sharpening blades. The square, already a bustle of activity, buzzed to life as soldiers stood and pocketed pistols and knives, setting aside their half-eaten meals or half-mended jackets. Most shrugged up their collars against the brisk fall breeze that snaked between tents and crates, rustling across the cracked pavement and shaggy green verge that circled the stately one-time courthouse at the center of the broad space.

They wore greens and grays and faded yellow, some with the benefit of flak jackets or tactical vests. All wore a round patch or armband – white on black. A firefly with wings spread.

Tommy straightened, letting the butt of his rifle gently drop from his shoulder as he turned to look towards the black-haired woman whose holler had struck the camp into life.

“Well, lookit that,” he said quietly, grinning sideways. “Looks like you’ll be spared any more humiliation, kid.”

Beside him, Joe Warren grimaced, letting his finger slide off the trigger of the hunting rifle he had been sighting along. He could not have been more than 18 or 19, a tall, skinny kid with a tousle of brown hair and a patchy beard that still struggled to grow in at the corners of his mouth. Like Tommy, Joe looked behind them, turning away from their makeshift little firing range to glance across the square. People were beginning to gather, readying for the arrival of the foretold wounded.

Joe turned back and pulled a face as he stared towards the far end of the shooting range, where sandbags had been stacked to create a distant wall and two paper targets gently rippled in the breeze. One had a ragged, gaping hole at its center from a cluster of well-placed shots. The other pointedly did not.

“Hey, don’t feel too bad,” Tommy said, chuckling as he elbowed the adolescent. “I’m sure there’s an ‘old’ joke in there somewhere. Somethin’ about how I been shootin’ since before you were conceived. Go on, I know you got somethin’ in you.”

Joe’s face suddenly brightened into a snide grin. “Shooting blanks maybe.”

“Ouch,” Tommy laughed.

Shaking his head, he hooked a hand into his rifle’s strap and slung it over one shoulder, motioning for Joe to do the same. Together, they left the small shooting range behind and began moving towards the corner of the square that had been cleared for transport vehicles and medical tents. As they neared, they sobered at the distant growl of diesel engines.

Barricades had been set up far from the square itself, down each of the side streets that branched off from it. Most consisted of sandbags and crates, barbed wire strung across their tops and staked down in great coils several feet in front of the barricade itself. They would not hold out other soldiers, but they were effective at stringing up the odd stray infected that had not yet been cleared from the quarter mile surrounding the square. To ward against enemy troops, there were picket lines thrust out well away from the camp and snipers perched atop high points with wide lines of sight. Scouts reported the military was nowhere near here, but the Fireflies would hardly be taken by surprise if that changed.

The Fireflies.

It had been barely a month and a half since Tommy had stepped into the shell of an old minimart in the heart of the Boston Quarantine Zone, seeking Marlene and the promise of retribution or purpose or hope, or whatever she had promised without saying in so many words. Hope. The word still tasted sour on Tommy’s tongue. But perhaps that would change with time. Perhaps it would not. He had not yet decided whether he needed to care either way.

Marlene was nowhere to be seen now. No doubt she was closeted up somewhere beneath the limestone drum and copper dome of the looming museum building at the center of the square, surrounded by her commanders and strategists. Tommy had not yet even been assigned to a squad, having marched west from Boston with a loose mix of veterans and other new recruits like Joe nearly as soon as he had thrown in with the Fireflies.

Yet as Tommy and Joe approached the corner of the square where the wounded would be incoming, there was something collective in the somber, ready faces of the men and women who surrounded them. Something that seemed to tie them together, beyond the black and white insignias on their sleeves and jacket fronts. Tommy still felt an outsider to it.

Diesel engines guttered and rounded the corner at the far end of a street leading onto the square. First to appear was a ragged little pick-up truck on overlarge tires, the windows blown out and tailgate missing. Behind it came a long panel van, then a flatbed truck. Three, then four, then five vehicles total. A motley caravan of whatever still ran and would carry people. The Fireflies in the foremost transports leaned out of their windows and hollered at the guards on the barricade.

The makeshift wall parted, planks and pallets yanked aside to make way as the caravan rumbled into the relative safety of the encampment. As soon as they had groaned to a halt, the vehicles were surrounded. Someone began shouting directions above the gathered crowd.

“Reds into tent 1! Yellows to tents 2 and 3! Greens on the lawn by the courthouse! Come on, let’s get some extra hands in here!”

Medical personnel in smocks and gowns had swarmed the caravan first, leaning into open car doors and over the sides of truck beds, using greasy, colored face paint crayons to mark _R_ or _Y_ or _G_ or _B_ on the foreheads of the wounded. Assessing their priority of treatment with cold efficiency.

Tommy lost sight of Joe in the mess of yelling and crying that greeted the arrival of the caravan, but he allowed himself to be carried towards one of the vehicles, the flatbed truck, where men and women sat or lay piled together, their limbs dangling over the sides. Their faces wore exhaustion like an old friend, haunted and bloody and gritty with earth and smoke, but wearily triumphant with return and the postponement of death for just another day.

At the tail end of the flatbed truck, Tommy looked up towards a young black-haired man sitting upright, a grimace of pain contorting his dark brown face. He was perhaps five or six years younger than Tommy. Blood had soaked the lower fringes of one pant leg and dripped slowly from the heel of the boot that hung over the flatbed’s side. Someone had written a lopsided yellow _Y_ on his forehead.

“Here we go,” Tommy prompted, holding up his heads to help the young man down. “I gotcha. Just take it easy.”

The young man scooted forward to prepare to lever himself off the flatbed, nodding a grunt of tired gratitude as Tommy reached up to grab his elbow and brace him against any need to put weight on his wounded ankle.

“Lucas!”

As the young man hit the ground on his remaining good foot and leaned into Tommy for support of his bad one, an older man in a gray tactical vest and black stocking cap came wading through the crowd, gently pushing around others helping unload the wounded until he was at Tommy’s side. He was perhaps in his late fifties or early sixties. Without prompting or explanation between them, Tommy and the older man stepped to either side of their wounded charge, wrapping his arms around their shoulders to act as his impromptu crutches.

The young man, Lucas, smiled wearily and quietly murmured, “Dad. I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s just a ricochet.”

The resemblance between the two men was obvious, though Lucas, wider across the chest and longer in the torso, towered over his father. But they both had the same broad face and low brow, the same creases beneath eyes and nose. Lucas clearly had not shaved in several days and black stubble roughened the deep brown of his cheeks. The older man’s beard was almost entirely gray, save for a touch of black still at the lips.

“Where’d they hit you?” the older man said, as he and Tommy started to maneuver Lucas away from the flatbed truck and towards one of the two medical tents designated for wounded with a yellow tag on their brow, indicating _urgent, second priority_.

Lucas grimaced and limped between his father and Tommy. “They didn’t,” he said, between sharp intakes of breath as he hopped on his good foot. “We hit them. Just south of Joliet. Pushed them across the Des Plaines River, but they fought like hell.”

“That’s Chicago?” Tommy asked.

The young man nodded. “Southwest suburb of the city, at least. About two hours north of here, if you’re driving.”

His father frowned, grunting as Lucas stumbled for a second. “Was it just Fireflies?”

“No. CFF was there again. Those Chicago boys are fucking nuts. Stand ‘em up two-to-one against the Feds and they’ll mess those assholes up every time.”

Tommy had heard reference to the CFF many times since he had arrived at the Firefly camp several days ago. Chicago Freedom Fighters. The general consensus was that they had more audacity than most.

They had reached the first of two medical tents allocated for second priority urgent care. The flaps of the tent had been tied open and the wounded were already beginning to fill the chairs and beds and spare crates to await attention from a medic or doctor. Lucas allowed himself to be steered towards a folding metal chair against the nearest wall and collapsed gratefully into it when Tommy and his father released him. He let his injured leg stretch gingerly out before him.

When the older man stooped to look more closely at the bloody pant leg, Lucas waved him off. “I’m fine, dad. Go help the others. I’m not going anywhere.”

His father frowned unhappily for a second but acquiesced with a nod. “Be here when I get back.” He squeezed his son’s shoulder, then glanced at Tommy and jerked his head back towards the tent’s open flap.

The two of them stood back briefly to allow a woman with a bloody shoulder and forearm to enter the tent, then they ducked back out into the brisk October air.

“Your son, I take it?” Tommy said to the older man, stating the obvious as they began weaving between the busy hustle of people, making their way back towards the caravan of vehicles where the wounded were still being off-loaded.

“Yes,” the man said. “Lucas.”

He pulled his black stocking cap off and used it to gently wipe his eyes. The movement was jerky, not quite shaking, but not quite steady either. He cleared his throat with a sharp cough.

“I’m Tommy, by the way,” Tommy said, nodding an introduction as if he had not noticed the other’s sudden release once out of Lucas’s sight. “Tommy Miller.”

The older man had started to run a hand through sweaty silver hair that had stood out at odd angles as he had pulled his cap off, but he paused at Tommy’s words, his expression abruptly twisting to mild recognition.

“Miller? New recruit, from Boston?”

Tommy nodded.

“Huh.” The man pulled his cap back on, his movements steady again, refocused. “Think I just got told you’re joinin’ my squad.”

“Oh? News to me.”

“You and a couple other newbies. We’re Foxtrot, Squad Leader Erik Griggs. 3rd Platoon, B Company, Security Division. They’re bulkin’ us up before they send us west.”

Tommy stepped around a Firefly limping between two comrades, chunks of what looked like shrapnel bloodying mid-section and left thigh. He looked back to the older man, expression wondering. “We’re not goin’ to Chicago?”

The man shrugged. “Not yet, at least.”

They had reached the vehicles again, and headed for the rear of the column, where an army green canopy truck was still gently idling with a low, menacing growl. _FEDRA_ was still visible on the truck’s doors and sides, though the letters had been scratched through and spray-painted over with the now fading white sigil of the Fireflies.

Tommy reached up to one of the struts of the canopy top and pulled himself into the back of truck, where the wounded still lay splayed out in orderly, groaning rows. A medic was at the far end of the bed, nearest the cab of the truck, leaning over the prone soldiers and using those greasy colored crayons to mark death and judgment across the sweaty brows of the Fireflies still waiting to be off-loaded.

“Here,” Tommy grunted, pulling at the shoulders and collar of a woman’s jacket and waving for his new squad mate to take hold of the woman beneath her arms. She was conscious, but she had screwed her eyes up in pain. Blood had smeared across her face and down the side of her nose from a deep gash above one eye, and she had burns from her jaw line down the entire length of one arm. The charcoal tatters of her jacket had fused to her skin in places.

A red _R_ had been scrawled over one cheek, in a clear patch of skin where the blood had not dried.

She cried out in pain as Tommy’s companion hooked hands under her arms and began pulling her out of the truck. Tommy took hold of her ankles and lifted her legs. He dropped down from the rear of the truck bed as gently as possible, but she still gave a long groan, a drawn-out noise of pleading and pain and resignation.

“C’mon,” the older man said, jerking his head back towards the line of medical tents. “We have a tent for reds.”

Whether the woman passed out or had passed beyond the ability to give any conscious indication of pain, she made no more utterances as they awkwardly carried her between them, her body limply swinging as Tommy navigated the crowd, walking backwards.

At the entrance of tent 1, designated for reds – or _urgent, first priority_ – a black woman with gray hair and a surgical mask quickly looked their charge over and pointed them towards a cot at the far end of the tent. Unlike the tents for those triaged as yellow, the cacophony of sounds that permeated the close air here were uncontrolled and urgent, piercing cries and shaking sobs as medics pulled off jackets and cut through shirts. The wounds were uniquely wartime. No single gunshots or broken limbs, but flesh twisted and burnt and rent asunder by automatic weapons and explosives. One man lay on the ground as a nurse unwound a wad of bloody gauze from his hand, exposing ragged fingertips blown off at the first knuckle. Another leaned back on a cot and held hands to his face against silent tears while a doctor plunged a syringe into his leg, just above a belt-turned-tourniquet and the bloody stump and jagged edge of bone that was all that remained of the man’s right foot.

The air was heavy with the iron stench of blood.

It had been a long time since Tommy had quailed at the sight of torn flesh and human misery, and he did not do so now. But his face was hard and cold once he and the older man exited the tent. They both stood a moment, letting the fresh air fill their lungs as the cries from within the tent were muffled behind the canvas flap entry.

“Not quite the illustrious revolution you were expectin’, I imagine,” said the other man quietly, his tone half embarrassed, half probing, as if testing Tommy’s reaction.

Tommy grimaced, then gently shook his head. “I’ve spent a lot of time in and out of quarantine zones,” he said grimly, not looking at his companion. “And on the wrong side of the military more often than not. I got no illusions what this is about.”

The older man glanced sidelong at Tommy, as if really looking at him for the first time. He was shorter than Tommy, if stockier of frame, but it meant he had to look up to meet Tommy’s eyes. When he did so, he frowned, then gave a curt nod.

“Seems not.” He held out a hand. “Max Rojas.”

Tommy paused a moment, nodded in return, and met Max’s proffered hand.

Without a word, they returned to the trucks, where the hubbub had slowed somewhat as the most urgent wounded had been off-loaded and hurried away.

As before, Tommy clambered into the back of the large canvas truck while Max waited on the ground at the tailgate. Tommy had to duck his head to avoid hitting the ribs of the awning as he shuffled to the far end of the bed, where a man was seated on one of the fold-down benches on either side of the bed, limp frame slumped against the cab of the truck. In the dim light of the covered bed, Tommy could see a dark stain across the man’s torso, but little else. When the man did not move, Tommy knelt and pushed back his hanging head. The face was young. Pale and motionless, eyes closed. A black _B_ stenciled across the brow. Tommy held a finger to the man’s throat.

“Max,” Tommy said quietly, looking back to where his companion stood at the foot of the truck. “I don’t think this one’s breathin’.”

A look of questioning had briefly lifted Max’s brow, but it dropped again now as the lines deepened across the older man’s brown face. His gave a single shake of his head and waved for Tommy to lift the dead man.

“Well, let’s get him up anyway. We’ve got a place for them too.”

* * *

** NOW **

Jesse had to help with the body. Even between the two of them, it was difficult to move. It was heavy, certainly, but it also was not whole. The gaping hole at the right knee made it impossible to grip the ankles without risking further damage. The head had to be carefully wrapped in a towel they found upstairs.

Tommy could not remember what had happened to Ellie while he and Jesse had hauled the body over the back of Joel’s horse. Dina had probably been with her. She was there too, though he did not know how that come to be, any more than he knew or cared what had brought Jesse or Ellie. Dina had briefly tried daubing the gash above his eye with a wet rag, but he had pushed her away. Had he been impatient or angry about it? He could not remember. He hoped not.

He did remember waking up. He had felt his fingers first. That numbing tingle of feeling returning after however long his hands had been tied behind him. The bruising throb around his wrists where they had used a zip-tie, leaving a sharp red ligature line. He supposed Jesse had cut the ties, and that the rush of blood to his previously bound arms had been enough to finally kickstart his unconscious mind.

But it was a dream that he had awoken to. A nightmare. A nightmare in his brother’s clothes.

Had he just lain there, staring? Had he yelled or cursed or cried? He could not remember that either. No, that was not quite true. He had not cried. He had been too late for that. Too late for tears of fury or frustration. Too late for tears of helplessness. Too late to cradle his brother and beg for a miracle. He had slept through it all. Until he had awoken to the deed already long done and a body already growing cold. What the fuck would tears do now.

When they finally started the somber ride back to Jackson, it took longer than normal. Jesse led their little line, and behind him, Joel’s horse, with its gruesome burden covered by a green and blue quilt. Tommy followed directly behind, hunched forward in the saddle, his eyes never leaving the quilt. Something at the back of his mind told him he should be looking to Ellie instead, to comforting her perhaps, but somehow, he could not bring himself to do so. So he rode before her and Dina, where he could not see what her face might hold, whether it was as vacant as his own, or whether there burned there anger and accusation.

When they did finally find themselves plodding sadly into town, the word seemed to have gone out before them. A riderless horse with a blanketed burden draped across its back was not an unknown sight in Jackson and would have been easy to see from one of its tall watch towers as they approached. The gates had opened silently before them and a small gathering of townsfolk had been waiting, lips parted in hollow question as they noted the faces of those returning, and the one face not among them. At some point, Tommy must have dismounted, though he could not recall having done so. At some point Maria was there too, pushing through the crowd, her father on her heels.

But Tommy’s ears felt stuffed with cotton and a low throbbing had started in his head, like a pounding, panicked heartbeat that moved down into his throat and threatened to squeeze the air from his chest. All he could see was the churned snow and mud beneath his feet, and the steady drip of bright red blood that was the only color, falling from beneath a quilt of green and blue.

* * *

Tommy.

_Tommy._

“ _Tommy._ ”

He looked up, startling.

Maria was stooping in front of him. Her hands were on his knees and he was seated, his elbows on arm rests, slouched against a hard back.

“ _Where’s Joel?_ ” he said suddenly, straightening.

Jesus, when was the last time he spoken? His voice felt like it had not been used in a hundred years. It came out like sandpaper. He cleared his throat and tried again.

“Where’s Joel?”

“Hey, easy, easy.” Maria put a hand on his arm, gently squeezing until he relaxed slightly, slowly letting himself sink back against the chair. “He’s next door. He’s in the next room. Tommy? Okay?”

Tommy took in the room they were in for the first time. It was Dr. Vrabel’s exam room, all pale blue walls and warm yellow light. A padded exam table stood at the center, behind which was a small desk and rows of charts affixed to the wall. Several chairs with hard backs and wooden armrests, like the one in which he was seated, were scattered around the edges of the room. All were occupied.

Dina and Jesse sat beside each other, leaning forward with elbows on their knees, and Maria’s father Edgar was there too, the deep creases above his white beard pinched into a long and pained expression. Ellie was on the exam table, seated upright but hunched forward, staring vacantly over Dr. Vrabel’s shoulder as he gently dabbed at the cuts on her face with a roll of gauze wet with rubbing alcohol.

And if they were in Dr. Vrabel’s exam room, then that meant that next door was the room he used for occasional surgeries. The room that doubled as Jackson’s morgue in times of loss.

Tommy closed his eyes.

“Tommy,” Maria said, so softly and gently that it made him wince. “What happened?”

He opened his eyes to glance at her for a second, his mouth opening, then gave a long sigh as he leaned back and let his head thump against the wall behind him. He stared at the ceiling.

“There was a group of ‘em,” he whispered. The small room quieted. “Eight, I think. At least that I saw.”

“It was eight.”

It was Ellie who had spoken. Tommy dropped his gaze from the ceiling to find her looking at him. But her expression contained none of the accusation he had expected to see. Only the same broken exhaustion that he felt.

He nodded. “Eight then. At, uh…the Baldwin place. That big mansion down the ridge from Snow King.”

The sandpaper in his throat was receding now, letting the words come more easily, if still slowly. He gently shook his head as he spoke, replaying the memory in his head as he stared at the floor, avoiding the eyes of the others in the room. “We…found this girl. We found this girl, up at Snow King, where the gondolas dock. Big girl, all muscle. She was runnin’ from infected. Place was swarmed. Infected everywhere. She said she and some folks had holed up at the Baldwin place. That they had a fence round the whole house.”

He swallowed, shifting his jaw at the bitter recollection.

“So we followed her.”

The uneasy silence that greeted this revelation was almost more than Tommy could bear, so he plowed on, feeling the anger now begin to lace his words. “They knew us. Or knew of us, at least. Our names. They wanted Joel.”

“How do you know?” Maria asked quietly.

“You mean aside from them torturin’ him and not me?”

Maria did not shrink from the snapped response, but she did take a deep breath and patiently try again. “What did they want with him?”

“I don’t…” Tommy faltered. “I don’t know.” He saw Ellie glance at him, some small, shared thought passing between them just for an instant before he looked away again. “They blew his goddamn knee off, then knocked me out. I slept through the whole fuckin’ thing.”

Maria’s expression softened at the bitterness in his voice and she squeezed his arm again, as if giving him the small reassurance of her touch could lift the weight pressing down on him.

Ellie shifted, looking around Dr. Vrabel so she could see Tommy. “Do you know who the girl was? The one you found?”

He shook his head, then stilled as a memory detached itself. “No, but…said her name was Abby, I think. There was another woman – small, short hair – called herself Mel. Didn’t get any other names.”

“Abby.” The lines around Ellie’s eyes visibly hardened. “She’s the one who killed him.”

They all hushed.

It was Maria who broke the silence finally, standing and looking back towards Jesse, Dina, and her father. “They don’t sound like bandits. But it’s hard to say where they would be coming from or headed to, without more. Ellie?” She gave Ellie a questioning look.

But Ellie only shook her head, finally waving away Dr. Vrabel’s ministrations. “I don’t know,” she said impassively.

“They’re from Seattle.”

The room collectively turned to look at Tommy again. “Or at least, they might be.” He tapped a finger against the outside of his upper arm. “They had these patches. _W.L.F._ ”

“What’s that mean?” Maria said.

“Washington Liberation Front.”

“How do you…know?” She fixed him with a quizzical look.

He shrugged. “I fought alongside ‘em once, long time ago.”

“And you’re sure they’re from Seattle?”

“I don’t know. The W.L.F. was, once. But this group would’ve been kids then. It’s maybe…fifteen years ago I last saw ‘em. They were fightin’ in Idaho then. Hittin’ FEDRA supply routes from potato country. I don’t know what happened to ‘em after that.”

It had been a little under fourteen years, in fact. Fourteen years and a whole lot of history. Tommy knew better than most how the fortunes of a group like the WLF could change over such a period, for better or for worse. But Seattle was a lead. And as far as he could tell, the only one they had.

* * *

The side of the pistol gleamed in the light of the single desk lamp, its metallic black long ago gone dull with age and use. Tommy had disassembled and reassembled it, cleaning and oiling the old gun and letting his mind go blank as he worked. Something in the slow movement of the bristle brush back and forth through the barrel and in the gentle wiping of the built-up carbon from the inside of the slide served to focus his attention. The pounding in his head had stopped and he was finally beginning to feel as if he could take full breaths, but the entire day had felt like drowning, like an unreal dream he could not wake up from. Now, the metallic click and slide of shifting pistol parts, the astringent smell of the cleaning solvent, these were real. And with them came a hardening of the edges of Tommy’s own reality.

Joel was dead.

He still was not sure he could have said the words out loud, but they ran across his mind like an endless marquee, all flashing lights and intrusive colors. Mocking in their repetition.

Downstairs, he heard the screen door whine and slap as the front door opened. A quiet murmur of voices and footsteps. Tommy looked up, staring out the window. It was snowing again, a light, lazy kind of snow. Edgar would have called it “scraping the sky”, that modest snowfall that seems so frequently to follow on the heels of storms, as if the sky were shaking out the last few tenacious flakes from the clouds, scraping the bottom of the barrel.

He pushed the pistol across the desk, then laid out three full magazines beside it. He had already laid out the other necessities for travel. An old compass. A water filter. A collapsible stove. Matches in a waterproof case. They had all needed some dusting off, but most were in good working order.

The voices downstairs faded and light footsteps mounted the stairway to the second floor.

Reaching down, Tommy drew out the center drawer of the desk. Within were the usual assortment of oddments and forgotten things that people usually shoved into their desk drawers. Or at least, that Tommy shoved into his desk drawers. He was sure Maria’s desk was better organized. Pens and papers, a few screwdrivers, a box of nails, a folding pocketknife, a key chain with the state of Texas dangling from one end. Towards the back, safe from the mash of other scattered paraphernalia that had been stuffed into the drawer, Tommy drew out two items.

One was an old pocket planner, its ratty leather front faded to gray and tattered around the edges. Birdshot flecked the cover, but the indent of _2013_ could still be seen where gold lettering had long ago peeled away. Tommy ran his finger across the cover, staring at it for a long moment, then tucked it safely back into the drawer. Instead, he looked to the second item, even plainer than the first. It was a black wristband, perhaps half an inch wide. So cracked with age and the sweat and dirt of many years of wearing that the rubber had grown brittle and stiff. Unlike the planner, this old thing had not even the indentation of former words, but Tommy knew what had been printed on the band, many years ago. A white swoosh logo. The words _JUST DO IT_.

“Tommy?”

He had felt Maria’s presence in the doorway behind him before she spoke, knew the light fall of her step on the upstairs landing. Dropping the wristband to the desk, he half turned, not looking towards the door, but indicating he had heard her.

“Yeah?”

“Ellie’s downstairs. She’s gonna stay the night on the couch. Maybe…maybe stay with us for a while.”

“Okay.”

They were brief, awkward words, filling the awful space that yawned between them. He could feel Maria still standing in the doorway and could imagine the uncertainty that must have traced across her face, the unconscious finger pulling strands of her graying blond hair back behind one ear. He felt an absurd sort of guilt at having put her in such a position, where she felt the need to comfort and yet did not know where to begin. Maria solved problems by doing, by analyzing the challenges, by determining means of overcoming them. And what could she possibly do now?

Tommy knew, and knew what she had been busy doing all evening. “Everythin’ ready for tomorrow?”

He heard her move, as if leaning against the doorframe. “Yes,” she answered quietly. “The service should start at noon. Dad’s letting folks know now.”

“That’s good.” After a second, he added, “Thanks.”

She shifted again, then the floorboards creaked as she crossed the room. Tommy felt her hands slip under his arms from behind, wrapping around him until they came together on his stomach. She pressed her head into the crook of his neck and let the loose strands of her hair catch in the side of his beard, brushing his temple. Suddenly acutely aware of the need for that simple, gentle embrace, he turned to lean into her, ignoring the bruise of pain that radiated out from the stitched gash above his brow as he pressed his cheek against hers. He looked down at her hands across his stomach – the fingers so slender, the nails kept pragmatically short – and closed his own hands over them, rubbing his thumb across the top of her index finger out of long habit.

“I’m so sorry, babe,” she whispered, barely audibly. “I’m so sorry.”

That was all she could do, and somehow it was enough. They stayed that way a long time, Tommy letting the smell of her wrap itself around him, dispelling the caustic sting of the firearm solvent in the air. Letting the warmth of her touch absorb his entire focus while that flashing marquee in his head dimmed for a few merciful minutes.

When they finally broke apart, it was at Tommy’s light pat on the back of her hand as he slowly drew a breath and released it.

“Why don’t you…why don’t you go bed?”

Maria straightened, but kept her hands on his shoulders. “You should too.”

He smiled ruefully. “I’m not sure I’m gonna sleep much, babe.”

Her eyes roved across his desktop, taking in the pistol and spare magazines, the compass and camping tools. When she looked back to him, there was a question in her face, but also understanding. And concern.

“We’ll talk in the morning, right?”

“Yeah. Course.”

She came round the side of his chair, so she could see him more fully. Her eyes moved up and down his face, searching. “Tommy…I know you feel like…” She broke off, swallowing the tremor in her voice. When she started again, she sounded more sure of herself. “You’re needed here too, remember. Just…please don’t make any decisions tonight. Okay? Please. We’ll talk more in the morning. Okay?”

He dropped his gaze, frowning as if half ashamed, as if having been caught out, though he had hardly done much to hide what he had been doing. But he cleared his throat a second later and waved dismissively. “Yeah, no, I’m just…I’m just…tryin’ to think through things. That’s all.”

“We’ll get through this together.” Maria gave him a small, sad smile, at least pretending to be reassured, even if that was not actually what she felt. She gently squeezed his shoulder. “At least try to come to bed, okay?”

He nodded.

She left him quietly, stealing out of the dim room as if disturbing him further would break the brittle promise she had received. Had there even been a need for it? What did he mean by dragging out these relics from another life, carefully gathering them together as if packing without actually quite doing so. The marquee was flashing back to life in his mind and the warmth and smell of Maria was already diminishing.

With a sudden angry burst of movement, Tommy threw his hands over his face and ran his fingers from brow to chin, rubbing at his eyes as if to clear his head. He pushed back from the desk and stood.

The staircase creaked as he made his way downstairs, descending into the dark living room. Only a single small lamp in the kitchen still gave a faint yellow glow, just barely reaching here into the living room and throwing fuzzy shadows against the far walls. At the center of the room, a dark bundle was curled into the leather sofa, a thick tangle of blankets and a head of brown hair, back turned to him and face buried into the leather cushions.

But as his boot thumped down on the final stair, Ellie’s head twisted up to look at him. He paused, lips parting, unsure if he should say something. Only her eyes seemed visible, or perhaps the shine in them made that seem so. He settled for a half-apologetic wave, as if he had wakened her, though he was certain he had not. When she did not curl back into herself, he dropped his gaze and moved past the sofa, deliberately fixing his attention on the passthrough to the kitchen rather than risking a backwards glance towards his adopted niece.

In the kitchen, Tommy fetched down an opened bottle of whiskey from above the refrigerator. It had a paper, handwritten label: _Snake River Distillery, Aged 8 Years, Batch 58, Bottled 2037_. He opened a cupboard and grabbed a small glass, then headed for the front door, bottle and glass in hand.

The screen door whined and slapped behind him as he stepped out into the cold winter night. It was still snowing, but it remained light, a silent falling of flakes against a black backdrop, with only a touch of breeze to disturb them. The low clouds and fresh covering on the ground muted the sounds of the town, which were quieting as the evening grew late anyhow. The streetlamps still buzzed, but everything else was still and silent on the white street that the house looked out upon.

Tommy had turned out the front porch light as he had come outside, leaving the covered porch cloaked in darkness, only barely illuminated by the distant glow from the nearest streetlamp one house down. To the right of the door, two rocking chairs stood on either side of a small, round table and Tommy settled himself into the furthest one, setting the whiskey bottle and glass on the table beside him.

He uncorked the bottle and poured a half inch of the amber liquid into the glass, knocking it back quickly. It raced warm and familiar from his throat to his gut, briefly burning a sharp contrast to the chill that pricked at his nose and ears. As he set the glass back on the table, he caught sight of a dark shadow across the inside of his coat sleeve, a smear of blacker color in the dim light of the porch, running from the wrist of the thick denim jacket almost to the inside of the elbow. With a sinking feeling, he twisted his arm to bring the sleeve better into the spare light of the distant streetlamp.

It was blood. The reddish-brown streak unmistakable. A dry stain not present before that morning.

Tommy ran a finger across it for a moment, his breathing once again quickening. Then he poured himself another glass and knocked that one back in one go too.

He was filling the glass a third time, this one more generous than the first two, when the screen door whined open again. Ellie stepped out onto the porch, still wearing her wrinkled gray sweatshirt, but with one of Maria’s plaid fleece blankets wrapped around her shoulders as well. She was in her socks.

Their eyes met for a moment, then she let her gaze slide away, glancing out at the white street as she slowly lowered herself into the second rocking chair. It groaned quietly beneath the new weight. She pulled her legs up onto the chair, hugging her arms around her knees and shrugging the blanket over them. Tommy could see her breath fog out in trembling short whispers, could catch the wet lines across her cheeks as they reflected in the streetlight.

They sat like that, not speaking. Sometimes there was nothing to say. Nothing needed to fill a silence that itself said everything that could be said.

Then Tommy plunked the glass of whiskey down beside her and gave it a small push.

Ellie stared at it for a second, then lifted it and took a small sip. Her face twisted slightly, but she wrapped herself around the glass, cradling it between her knees.

And together they sat there on that frigid porch, watching as the snow fell and the night grew deeper over a world that, for them, had utterly changed.


	3. Chapter 2 - Justice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a long one, so buckle up! It grew a bit beyond what I'd originally expected, so I ended up splitting it up, which is why it took me a little longer to update this time. Good news is that the next chapter is already half written as a result. Enjoy!

Chapter 2 – Justice

** THEN **

_April 2, 2021_

“Hey Tommy?”

“Yeah?”

“I think folks would understand if you missed.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean they’d blame you, obviously. You’d never live it down. But, I think…I think they’d get it, eventually. Movin’ target and all.”

Tommy barely shifted, his cheek pressed against the stock of his rifle, right eye peering through the scope. But he quirked a slight smile, not rising to the bait. “I ain’t gonna miss.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course. I’m sorry, I’m not tryin’ to make you nervous,” Max continued matter-of-factly, obviously trying to make Tommy nervous. “I’m sure you won’t miss.”

“You are such a fuckin’ asshole,” Tommy grinned, still only reacting by fractions of degrees of motion.

The world him around had narrowed entirely to what existed on the other end of the crosshairs. Cracked asphalt and shaggy sidewalks. A handful of cars that crowded the edges of the scope’s vision, their rusting bodies pierced by creeping vines. None of the stout little brick houses with square fronts and sharply sloped roofs entered his focus now, though he knew they were just outside that field of vision. All attention was on the street, where the stumps of trees that had once lined this blue collar suburbia stood side-by-side to the frost heaves that had cleaved deep crevices in a roadway now frequented only by the military.

Nearly three-quarters of the Denver Quarantine Zone sprawled across residential neighborhoods like this one. It was a stark contrast to the deeply urban slums of Boston, though the dilapidation and rot were just as obvious here, and worse in many ways thanks to Colorado’s brutal winters.

But one thing was perfectly familiar. The loudspeakers had blared to life just a half hour ago, stating that curfew was in effect. Outside, the street was quiet, the zone huddling down into a fragile stillness as the last light of the day faded to gray night.

“Here we go,” Max suddenly murmured beside him, stiffening.

Tommy did not need to look up to know the older man was peering through a pair of binoculars, focusing further down the street than where Tommy now aimed. Tommy slowed his breathing, timing the beats of his breath with the dull thump of his heart.

Max was all business now. “Single Growler,” he said quietly, steadily. “One armored active on the 50 cal. Two actives in the passenger and driver seats. Looks like…no armor. Approaching five hundred feet. No escort.”

Their intel had been good then. The Growler was a jeep-like vehicle designed for carrying in the bellies of military aircraft for fast attacks, but in Denver, they had been adapted largely to the transport of important FEDRA personnel. It was a light utility vehicle by comparison to the Humvees and massive troop carriers that usually patrolled the quarantine zone’s streets, but its potency was not lost thanks to the ugly black .50 caliber machine gun mounted on its back half.

There remained enough light in the sky for Tommy to make out the individual cracks in the asphalt of the street below, but that dusky half-light was beginning to smudge at the sharp edges of things. Tommy had to blink to focus, squinting through the scope in order to compensate for the failing light. Max continued murmuring beside him, his low rumbling voice steady and calm.

“Four fifty…Four hundred…Three fifty…Three hundred…Two fifty. Approaching engagement point…”

Tommy has positioned the rifle to pick up the approaching vehicle several dozen feet before the engagement point. As the front end of the Growler swam into the narrow world at the other end of the scope, he lifted the rifle just a fraction of an inch, centering his aim on one of the mildots below the crosshairs to account for bullet drop. It settled over the windshield of the vehicle, driver-side. Shadows and reflections of houses and trees flashed across the smooth glass surface as the Growler drew closer. Tommy could just make out a young face and a blue field cap behind the wheel.

“Two thirty…Twenty…Ten…Send it.”

Tommy stopped breathing and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle bucked against his shoulder and the deafening crack of its discharge filled the room, bringing the familiar whine to Tommy’s ears. In the next instant, his fingers had pried back the bolt and slotted a new cartridge home, and his eye came once again to peer through the scope. But there was no need.

“Got ‘em,” Max whispered beside him, a grin in his voice. “Goddamn, Tommy, you’re a fuckin’ animal.”

With the all-clear from his spotter, Tommy finally lifted his head from the scope with a smug smile and peered out to the street below. The vehicle had plowed off the road and into the side of a rotting mini van parked against the curb. The windshield on the driver side of the vehicle was a spiderweb of cracks with a single hole at the center.

A figure in the passenger seat was scrambling, pushing at the body of the dead driver, trying to shove it out of the doorless vehicle. The helmeted soldier standing at the 50 cal was shouting something, swinging the gun to aim down the street roughly in the direction of the house in which Tommy and Max now crouched at second story windows. Tommy quickly withdrew the barrel of his rifle from the open window. Even at twice this distance, if the gunner spotted them, the Growler’s powerful machine gun would cut them both in half.

Then suddenly a smoking canister was flying through the air from the far side of the street. A moment later, a second canister from the opposite side. Both blew out great gouts of white gas, landing in the middle of the roofless vehicle and spewing an obscuring haze of smoke all around it. As the helmet of the gunner disappeared into the smoke, black figures in gas masks emerged from the dusky shadows on either side of the street, rifles and pistols raised.

“That’s our cue,” Tommy muttered, rising.

Together, they pulled on gas masks and stocking caps, obscuring their identities as much as possible. The house they were in had been abandoned, its back half blown to splinters and rubble by some long-ago conflict, but the rest of the neighborhood was decidedly not. Tommy had already seen wary hands pulling back curtains and blinds in the houses across from them, pale faces crowding the windows.

Descending the staircase quickly, Tommy and Max vaulted rotting tables and chairs and crunched across shards of glass as they made their way out the exposed back-end of the ruined house and into a backyard strewn with overgrown bricks and debris. They entered the narrow side yard, both grasping their hunting rifles at the ready as they jogged towards the street. Tommy could hear shouting. Sharp, barked tones of command undercut by voices more panicked, less organized.

As they emerged onto the street, Tommy heard one high-pitched cry, then a cacophony of stuttering gunfire. Ahead of him and Max, the tear gas had cleared enough to reveal the Growler’s outline again. Its windshield was shattered now and splattered with blood, and bullet holes streaked its army green flanks. One body spilled out of the front passenger-side. The gunner was a gurgling, dying mess on the street behind the vehicle, his graceless flop backwards having left a wet red streak all down the spare tire mounted at the rear.

By the time that Tommy and Max reached the Growler, all was still, save for the three Fireflies surrounding it. All three wore gas masks as well.

“Jesus Christ,” Tommy grunted. He looked up at the nearest Firefly, a tall, square man with an unshakeable kind of ease in his movements. “That went to plan apparently.”

“It was a contingency,” Erik Griggs, squad leader of Foxtrot Squad, grunted in resignation. He sounded tired and disappointed, even through his gas mask. “She pulled a gun. Idiot.”

“Who?”

“Sanchez.”

Tommy came around Griggs, peering at the doorless passenger side. The woman who slumped half out of the vehicle, feet still on the floorboards, was perhaps 40. Her bloody, light brown face still stared up open-eyed from the asphalt. Two captain’s bars were stitched into the blue field cap that had fallen away from her, and into the sides of her uniform collar. Captain Estelle Sanchez. Denver’s Deputy Chief of Resource Acquisition, Foraging Service Unit. The woman in charge of the QZ’s foraging patrols.

She had two bullets in her throat.

“Well, that’s inconvenient,” Tommy muttered as Griggs pushed past him.

“Any documentation,” Griggs barked, snapping the others into action. “Papers, notebooks, briefcases, binders. Move, people.”

Tommy and Max scanned the street, their pre-assigned duty, as the others dove into the Growler, checking under seats and flipping over bodies to rifle pockets. Joe and a woman named Andrea accompanied Griggs, both also Foxtrot grunts. Joe pulled a slight face as he jerked back the blue-uniformed body that was slumped against the steering wheel, a kid with blond hair and acne, a bloody hole gaping where his nose had been.

Tommy felt his pulse begin to race as his eyes scanned the windows of the square houses around them, noting the alarmed faces and terrified expressions. The Fireflies all wore civilian clothing to blend in while in the zone, but their black armbands with the stark white sigils must have lit up like Christmas lights even in the dusky dark. That was intentional, of course – a collective identity for witnesses to see and recall, while individual identities were protected by the masks – but it still felt like wearing a target on their sleeves.

“Got it!” Griggs cried suddenly, coming up from beneath the passenger seat with a leather bag clutched triumphantly in gloved hands.

“Good,” Tommy said, lifting his rifle to stare through the scope, sighting down the street in the direction the Growler had originally been headed. “’Cause we got company, boss.”

Miniature figures shifted at the far end of the scope as he looked through it, at first too distant to tell their exact shape, but then rapidly materializing into the square green fronts of approaching vehicles.

“Inbound from the high school, SL.”

“Okay, wrap it up, people,” Griggs said with surprising composure. “Evac route 1. Max and Tommy, slag the 50 cal, then get on our asses. Rendezvous at Point Turkeyshoot if we get separated. Let’s move!”

Their squad leader waved for Andrea and Joe to follow him and nodded to Tommy and Max in departure. The three other Fireflies took off at a jog, vaulting a line of jersey barriers that blocked a nearby side street and disappearing down a long line of square brick houses just like the street they were currently on.

Max was already in motion.

“You got this?” Tommy asked, to which his older comrade nodded once.

Max wore a long green jacket beneath which he could hide the hunting rifle he carried, if necessary. But it also bulged out oddly in several spots. Pulling open one flap now, he unclipped and drew out a cylindrical thermite grenade, FEDRA stamped across its plain gray sides. Tommy backed a good 20 feet away from the Growler.

Glancing at Tommy, who nodded his readiness, Max wrapped a finger through the pin, twisted, and pulled, keeping his fingers clamped down on the safety lever. Surprisingly agile despite his age, he heaved himself up onto one of the rear tires, set the grenade carefully atop the .50 cal machine gun, and released the lever. Jumping down, he backpedaled quickly.

The grenade did nothing for a second.

Then with a _whumph_ and a gout of fire, it abruptly burst into a ball of blinding light. The grenade burned so hot and so bright that Tommy could not look directly at it, but sparks showered down on either side of 50 cal, scattering over the asphalt in an orange and white cascade.

The burn lasted for half a minute before the sparks abated and the flames died down, finally allowing Tommy and Max to see the red-hot metal beneath, where the center of the machine gun had been melted to slag.

Grinning, they nodded at each other, satisfied. God bless whatever asshole in FEDRA had decided those puppies were still worth manufacturing.

Tommy cast a wary eye back down the street, towards the approaching vehicles. It was probably his imagination, but it seemed as if they had increased their speed. He could make out two trucks now with the naked eye. Both looked like canvas-topped troop carriers.

“Time to go,” Tommy said.

They peeled off their gas masks and ran.

The pre-designated evacuation route took them east, down the same road Griggs and the others had taken, before diving into one of the many single-lane alleys that ran between the backs of houses, one-time access to detached garages and neat little rows of garbage cans. Now, the alley was strewn with filth and forgotten things. Moldy sofas pulled up beside garbage cans turned into fire pits. Old wooden fences torn down to create damp shelters draped in tarps, or else thrown into piles for later use as fuel for the fires. The detached garages that fronted the alley would largely be occupied. Rough converted living spaces to cram more people into, in a quarantine zone already bursting at the seams.

Halfway down the alley, they dove off it, loping into the backyard of another square brick house and down along its side until they emerged onto the street beyond. The houses on the other side left an even narrower gap between them, only a couple feet, but Tommy knew that the backyard beyond had seen its fence torn down many years ago. Through there would lead to another alley, then through more backyards, and more streets, and more alleys. Avoiding the major thoroughfares and areas where the military had thrown up jersey barriers or checkpoints.

But as he and Max began to cross the street towards the houses with the particularly narrow gaps between them, a diesel engine growled on their left. A second later, the low, wide body of a Humvee rumbled into view, a spotlight mounted on its open back.

“Shit!” Tommy suddenly hissed, eyes widening.

He and Max has not stopped, but their jog had slowed in dawning horror at the appearance of the Humvee, less than 200 feet away. Its spotlight swept across the street and hit them just as surprise gave way to action and they redoubled their pace. Tommy heard shouting above the growl of the engine and a loudspeaker crackled to life.

“ _Stop! On the street, stop where you are!_ ”

Like hell. Tommy sprinted for the cover of the houses on the other side of the street, cursing the poor luck that had brought a random patrol so close to their location, where they had no doubt responded to the sound of shots fired. He could feel his heart clattering in his ears, adrenaline rising to a high-strung whine as his mind willed his body to move faster. Each moment he expected to hear the sound of automatic gunfire behind him, expected to see Max felled in his peripheral vision or to feel the sharp explosion of pain that would knock the air from his lungs and tumble him to the ground.

But none of that happened and Tommy did not look back to question why. He and Max made it to the opposite row of houses and dove into the narrow gap between two of them. Boots crunched over a broken cement walkway strewn with weeds. The fading light made the shadowed path almost entirely dark and Tommy ran more by feel than by sight.

He could hear Max puffing behind him as they skirted the side of the house and emerged into a backyard littered with dark shapes. A harsh angle of light suddenly slashed across the detached garage ahead of them.

Turning to look behind, Tommy saw two bobbing beams of light coming along the side of the house after them, each at shoulder height and moving with the tell-tale rigidity of rifle-mounted spotlights.

And as Tommy rounded the side of the detached garage, he could see the alley beyond and a flood of light in front of them now too. The sound of garbage cans clattering and being crunched under wheel drowned out the pounding in Tommy’s chest and ears. The Humvee had entered the alley. They were being followed and cut off simultaneously.

“Fuck! C’mon, Max!” Tommy growled as he put on an extra burst of speed, hoping against hope to be able to cross the small alleyway before the Humvee could sever that means of escape.

But before he could even finish the thought, the great brute of a vehicle roared across the path in front of them, drawn by the beams of light flashing into the alley from their pursuers behind.

They were caught.

Gasping from the run and from sudden realization, Tommy ground to a halt. Max came up short beside him.

“Goddamn fuckers,” Max grunted, chest heaving. There was an angry edge around the frustration in the other man’s tone. Max’s stoic good humor always gave way to an unexpectedly bitter fierceness whenever FEDRA was involved. He was glancing behind them now, slowly raising his hands, a scowl twisting his features.

“ _Stop right there!_ ” Voices barked around them. Flashlights fixed on their position, shown into their eyes. “ _Hands in the fucking air!_ ”

Tommy raised his hands too, glaring, feeling that cold shifting at the pit of his stomach.

The Humvee had stopped in front of them with a squeal of tires and creaking metal. Tommy heard the driver’s door open on the far side now. From behind the spotlight at the open rear of the vehicle, a tall soldier in body armor and a helmet, a black bandana covering half his face, jumped down and pointed an assault rifle with mounted light directly into Tommy’s face. Four soldiers in all then.

The armored soldier from the rear of the Humvee advanced on Tommy, growling out short, clipped orders. “Hands in the air! Keep ‘em up, asshole! Erling, Poulson – we got ‘em!”

The two bobbing lights behind Tommy and Max materialized into two privates with assault rifles raised, a man and a woman, stepping into the flood of light cast by the powerful spotlight atop the Humvee. A second later, the driver stepped into the light as well, a square black man in body armor with two corporal’s chevrons on his sleeve, his face obscured by the glare of the light behind him.

“Erling, Poulson,” the corporal snapped, gesturing with the tip of a heavy pistol he had pointed at the Fireflies. “Grab their guns.”

Tommy felt one of the two soldiers behind him step up and brusquely jerk the strap of his hunting rifle off his shoulder. A second later, rough hands felt him up from behind, removing the pistol and knife from beneath his jacket.

“Get ‘em on the ground,” the corporal ordered once both Tommy and Max were disarmed.

Without warning, the armored soldier from the spotlight stepped up in front of Tommy and swung the butt of his assault rifle. The stock crashed into the side of Tommy’s head, bursting blackness and stars across his vision. He heard himself cry out and the next moment he was on the ground, palms digging into the broken cement walkway. Pain lanced out from the place where the hard corner of the stock had caught him, and his ears rang. Somewhere nearby, he could hear Max struggling, then a bark of pain as his comrade fell to the ground beside him.

But it did not end there. As Tommy shook his head, staring at the ground, blinking to clear his vision, the butt of the rifle crashed down again, this time squarely across his upper back. Then again, in a vicious blow to his kidney that caused his back to arc involuntarily, a feeling like battery acid racing through his veins jolting out from the spot. By the time a fourth blow slammed against the back of his head and drove his bloody nose into the ground, he was spread-eagled on his stomach and temporarily stunned into immobility.

He was just consciously beginning to process the pain radiating from his kidney up into his guts when he heard the corporal dispassionately grunt a new order.

“Find their tags.”

Callous hands flipped him onto his back and he briefly struggled despite the daze of pain and the blinding light shining down at him, as he felt gloved fingers suddenly wrapping around his neck, jerking back his collar. Then a sharp tug as the thin chain around his neck was yanked and broken.

A pause.

“Tommy Miller,” the corporal grunted, the chain rattling slightly as he flipped the Firefly pendant over in his hand. Then another rattle. “And Max Rojas. Well kids, you done fucked up.”

Tommy felt the corporal kneel beside him and rolled his head to look up at the broad black man, still more silhouette than real person with that damned spotlight behind him. But the menacing growl that hovered over Tommy was real enough.

“You fuckers think you can come into our zone and stir shit up? We’re gonna fuck you up so bad you’ll be beggin’ us to just shoot you. We’re gonna find your family. We’re gonna find your friends. We’re gonna fuck up every goddamn person you’ve ever met.”

Despite the pain still churning his insides and ringing in his ears, a flash of fury rushed through Tommy and swung his left hand up towards the corporal’s throat. But the move was weak, the beating Tommy had taken making his limbs limp and heavy. The corporal caught his wrist easily, twisting it with disdain as he stood and sending a fresh jolt of pain down Tommy’s arm.

“Get ‘em up,” the corporal sneered, gesturing impatiently towards the Humvee. “They’re goin’ to the courts.”

Tommy groaned. The courts were the dozen or so tennis courts at Denver’s former City Park, where prisoners were held in open-air stockades as they awaited interrogation or execution.

The spotlight blinding him was temporarily blocked by the bulky figure of one of the soldiers as the front of Tommy’s coat was grabbed and he was hauled to his feet. The tall private with a bandana across his face glared down at Tommy, shoving him towards the Humvee so hard that he stumbled forward and slammed against its side, sinking to one knee. Then his arms were jerked awkwardly and his hands wrenched behind his back as the soldier began wrapping a zip-tie around his wrists. A second later Max hit the Humvee beside him as well, arms similarly pulled behind him as their captors made to bind them. A cut across the older Firefly’s mouth was bleeding generously into the chin of his silver beard.

An instant later, a shot rang out.

Tommy jerked his head aside as a sharp _thunk_ spidered the Humvee window nearest him into a circle of cracks, a bullet passing through without shattering the hardened glass. Blood was dripping down the vertical window.

Eyes widening, Tommy only belatedly realized the pressure holding his wrists together had slackened at the same moment as the shot had cut the evening air. He twisted just in time to see the soldier with the bandana crumpling to the ground, his throat a mangle of flesh and blood from the bullet that had ripped through it and into the Humvee window beyond.

Another shot rang out, then another. Tommy saw the two other privates, Erling and Poulson, jerk backwards next from the impact of bullets, both collapsing to the ground in spasms of pain that quickly stilled. Tommy saw a shadow cross to his right and glanced up to see the corporal turning to scramble behind the body of the Humvee.

With his hands free, Tommy struggled to his feet and dove after the corporal, catching the square man around the middle and falling to the ground on top of him with a grunt. The corporal, on his stomach beneath Tommy, immediately twisted, throwing back an elbow to try and roll his pursuer off him. He halfway succeeded, his elbow connecting with the side of Tommy’s head in the same spot the butt of the assault rifle had a few minutes before and bursting a fresh lance of pain across the tender spot. But as Tommy loosened his grip and the corporal started to rise, Tommy felt someone loom into his peripheral vision, saw a pistol raised a few feet away, and heard the sharp crack as it fired. The corporal flopped back to the ground in a howl of pain, clutching at his right arm and the wet bloody stain suddenly soaking into the torn sleeve there.

Breathing hard, Tommy released the writhing corporal and looked up. A tall, lanky figure stood over him, an older man with a face swathed in grizzled, curly black hair that hung to his shoulders. On one jacket sleeve, the black and white sigil of the Fireflies gleamed in the light from the Humvee. His face was mostly obscured by a messy black beard streaked with gray, but when he grinned down at Tommy, a gold tooth glinted in the black mass with such conspiratorial amusement that Tommy instinctively found himself grinning back with relief.

“Tommy!” Eugene greeted, helping Tommy to his feet, then giving a snort of laughter. “Didn’t realize I was savin’ _your_ ass. Mighta left you if I’d known.”

“Nah,” Tommy returned, still smiling as he shook his head and brushed dirt from his coat sleeves. “You’d miss me too much.”

Eugene opened his mouth as if to consider for a moment, then shrugged with a wicked arch of his thick black brows. “Who can say?”

He brushed past Tommy and knelt over the corporal still moaning on the ground. As Eugene neared, the corporal thrashed as if to push himself away, even prone as he was on the ground.

“Ah ah ah,” Eugene chided, wagging a finger as he stepped onto the corporal’s chest, bearing the wounded man down again. “Well now, if it isn’t Corporal Fuckmeister.”

Eugene shown a flashlight down at the corporal’s face and Tommy caught his first glance of a name patch across the front of the blue uniform that read _Fulmaster_. Eugene reached down and dug a pistol from the black man’s holster and a knife from his belt.

“ _Linden?_ ” Corporal Fulmaster said suddenly, incredulously, his bleeding arm momentarily forgotten.

“In the flesh,” Eugene grinned, spreading his hands wide.

Others were materializing from the shadows along the alleyway now, men and women likewise wearing civilian attire but with the Firefly armband around one sleeve. Griggs and Andrea and Joe were there, as well as three others. Foxtrot Squad and Eugene’s own Kilo Squad.

“You know this guy?” Tommy said, coming around Eugene to look at the prostrate FEDRA corporal.

Eugene chuckled, but did not answer.

“You son of a bitch,” Fulmaster spat, expression once again twisting into pain as he cradled his wounded arm. “You traitor motherfucker—"

“Eugene,” Griggs cut in, voice low and urgent. “Wrap up the history lesson. Those trucks from the high school will be here any moment. We gotta move.”

“Fair enough,” Eugene sighed. One of his squad had retrieved Tommy’s rifle and pistol and knife from Privates Erling and Poulson, and Eugene passed them back to Tommy now, nodding at Corporal Fulmaster. “Would you do the honors, my man?”

Tommy slung the rifle over a shoulder, then arched a brow at Eugene. “You sure? Sounds like you two got history.”

“Nah. I’ve already closed out my history with this piece of shit’s friends. He’s all yours.”

Shrugging, Tommy lifted the pistol.

“Wait wait wa—” Fulmaster said suddenly, holding up a hand, eyes widening.

Tommy pulled the trigger. The man’s head jerked violently and blood and bone blew out the back of it, spattering the cement walkway beneath him.

As Tommy holstered the pistol, Eugene held up a fist. A black tattoo twisted around the back of his wrist and onto the outside of his hand, a woman bearing a beam balance scale and a curved scythe. Lady Justice with Death’s scythe in hand. She notably lacked her traditional blindfold. Eugene bumped his fist against Tommy’s and held the gesture for a serious moment. “No shame in justice, brother.”

Tommy nodded.

“ _Eugene_ ,” Griggs said again, more urgently this time.

“Okie dokey,” Eugene said, breaking the seriousness with sudden mock cheerfulness. “Time to go, kids.”

* * *

An hour later, they sat huddled in the gloom and dank of one of the Fireflies’ safe houses. It was a large basement with an entry straight from the outside and two narrow windows high in the walls on either side of the space. The windows were covered over with thick cloth and only a single battery-powered lantern lit the subterranean room, casting harsh white shadows across rusting washer and dryer units and the skeleton of a hot water heater lying on its side.

Griggs and Andrea stood over a wooden table, the single lantern beside them, pouring over the contents of Captain Sanchez’s satchel. The rest of the Fireflies had settled in uncomfortably around the spare room, shoving aside shelves and cans of paint to make spaces where they could curl up to catch some sleep or else sit with their backs against the cement wall and murmur small snatches of conversation.

Tommy sat propped up in one corner with Max and Eugene, gingerly resting his bruised back against the cool cement. He was holding up a flashlight to Max’s chin as the older man used a wet cloth and a tiny mirror in the cover of his compass to dab at the blood that had dried in his beard.

“Why’s it always the mouth they kick you in?” Max was muttering as he gently fingered his mouth, where both lips had been split with one vicious boot toe and the skin surrounding had darkened to a deep purple.

“Maybe it’s just you,” Eugene shrugged, lifting a brow. He sat with his legs drawn up, elbows resting on the knees. “You run your mouth at them or somethin’?”

“No,” Max rumbled. “I don’t have your talent for words, Eugene.”

“Ah, but few do. Few do.” Eugene nodded with exaggerated thoughtfulness, as if the world were a darker place for such lack of verbal dexterity. “And how about you, Texas?” he said, nodding at Tommy. “How’s the kidneys holdin’ up?”

Tommy grimaced and shook his head, shifting uncomfortably. “One of ‘em feels like it blew up on impact.”

Grinning, Eugene leaned over and suddenly flicked his middle finger at the side of Tommy’s back, where the assault rifle had crashed against the kidney an hour ago. Tommy yelped in surprise as electricity spiked out from the spot and he rammed an elbow into Eugene’s side. Eugene gasped and started laughing, great hushed guffaws that caused others in the dim basement to look up.

“Feels like it’s still there, unfortunately,” Eugene wheezed quietly, shaking with the effort of keeping his laughter down. “But hey, I’m sure you’ll only be pissin’ blood for a week. Maybe two, tops.”

Still gently rubbing at the tender spot, Tommy shook his head and gave Eugene a smile that promised revenge.

Tommy and the rest of Foxtrot Squad had met Eugene and the other Denver Fireflies two weeks previous, when their march west had finally brought them here. Denver was by far the largest and most powerful of the FEDRA quarantine zones in the west, barring the west coast itself. Housed in the remnants of a city that had once served as a crossroads of trade from San Francisco to Chicago, Denver QZ still served as that vital juncture, pulling in and pushing out resources from every major FEDRA outpost in the west. Oil and gas from the Denver-Julesburg Basin. Coal from central Utah. Potatoes from Idaho. Beef, pork, corn, wheat, soybeans, sorghum, and more from Nebraska and Kansas.

It was also the lynchpin in Marlene’s plans to divide FEDRA’s powerhouses on the east and west coasts.

“So what’s the story with you, Eugene?” Tommy said as Max tossed the rag he had been using away and Tommy pocketed his flashlight again. “Didn’t take you for former military, but your buddy Corporal Fuckmeister back there clearly had a bone to pick with you.”

Eugene flashed that gold-toothed grin again. “I’m _former_ former military. Like, a _long_ time ago. I’m fuckin’ old, man. Desert Storm shit ‘n that.”

“You served in Desert Storm?” Max said.

“Yup. Did my time, served my years, retired, and gave the United States Army the fuckin’ finger. Got fat, lost the buzzcut, and exclusively wore Hawaiian t-shirts and shorts. Damn, those were the days.”

Tommy chuckled, shaking his head. “Fat, huh? I don’t really see that.”

“Oh hell yeah,” Eugene nodded. “Man, I _loved_ bein’ fat. Shit, I was the _barbecue fuckin’ master_.” He leaned his head back against the wall with a dreamy smile, as if recalling smoked brisket and pulled pork and baby back ribs sizzling on the grill. Then he sighed heavily, expression shifting. “And then all this shit went down. Guess we were lucky, gettin’ into the quarantine zone and all. So they told us, anyway. They got me back in uniform, I got not fat, and…”

He drifted off, jaw tightening slightly. “Well, ain’t everything it’s chocked up to be,” he said, shaking his head. “Military’s still fuckers, except now they ain’t got civilian oversight, and the world’s gone to shit so it’s their fuckin’ playground. So they’re like, _really_ fuckers now.”

Tommy smiled plaintively, echoing the sentiment but catching the edge in Eugene’s voice and the deliberate vagueness of his response. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“Mm?”

“You said _we_ were lucky to get into the QZ. Who’s ‘we’?”

“Oh,” Eugene said. “My, uh, my wife. And daughter. They’re still here, but…yeah, you know, hard to see ‘em much, so…” He brushed the question away with a wave and changed the subject. “How about you two? Family?”

Max dropped his fingers from his mouth finally, shrugging. “Just my son and me. Anymore, at least. Just my son. He’s back in Chicago, MA Division.”

MA was the Military Affairs Division, the guerilla warfare arm of the Fireflies, most units of which had stayed behind in Chicago where the civil war there was just beginning to ratchet up. Lucas had bid his father farewell nearly six months ago now. Foxtrot and Eugene’s own Kilo Squad both belonged to the Fireflies’ Security Division. Kidnappings, assassinations, surveillance, infiltration. It had taken all of about two seconds for some uppity-up to see Tommy’s skill with a scoped rifle and assign him to SecDiv.

“Respect,” Eugene nodded to Max, impressed. Chicago had a fast-growing reputation. “And you, Tommy boy?”

“Uh, just my brother,” Tommy replied, attempting nonchalance. “He’s back in Boston.” After a second, he added, “Not a Firefly.”

“Family’s a bitch, right?” Eugene grinned, clearly catching the forced casualness in Tommy’s tone.

Before Tommy could reply, however, there was movement at the table where Griggs and Andrea stood. Tommy’s squad leader straightened and thumped a fist down on the worn tabletop, giving a muted whoop of triumph.

“Goddamn!” Griggs whispered, loudly and sharply enough to rouse the whole basement. Those Fireflies not sleeping abruptly sat up, eyes widening in question.

Griggs turned to the expectant gazes, the weary lines of his face finally brightening with success. “We’re in luck,” he said softly to the room, holding up a map with scrawls of black and red handwriting across it. “They steer their salvage patrols away from Boulder and go up to Longmont instead, if they head north. Too many infected in Boulder, according to Sanchez’s recommendations.”

Tommy’s brows drew together, confused. “I don’t understand. What’s in Boulder?”

“University of Eastern Colorado,” Eugene grinned.

“Okay? What, go Bighorns?”

Eugene chuckled. “There’s a lab there. A good one. Has everything Marlene wants, everything her people tell her we need to get started.”

“On what?” Tommy said, still not understanding.

Eugene’s eyes lit up.

“On a vaccine.”

* * *

** NOW **

He awoke to cold gray light and frosty windows that ran from floor to ceiling, whited out by the storm outside. Chill tiles outlined in red. The swish and thud of the club falling, and the long inhuman faces laughing at him so useless on the ground.

And then he awoke again.

It was warmer this time. A radiant, woody warmth from somewhere to his left. The ghost of the nightmare still blurred his vision, but he could feel his racing pulse begin to slow as his living room swam dimly into view. The room’s two small windows let in a pale light that lay across the back of the sofa, but the rest of the room was gently rolling in the smoky orange glow of the woodstove. The harsh laughter in Tommy’s ears gradually faded to the hum of the stove’s iron sides, and the swish and thud sharpened into the sound of scrubbing, coming from the house’s distant mudroom.

As he softly cleared his throat, he could feel the cobwebs in his chest from the whiskey the night before. His eyes wandered the room, orienting himself. He was seated upright in his recliner, a fleece blanket drawn up over him, though it had been shrugged down to his elbows as he slept. Ellie still lay on the sofa beneath a ball of blankets, her back to him. But mercifully, she did appear to actually be sleeping.

How late had they stayed up? Tommy could not remember when they had finally retreated from the frozen porch. It had been some time after the snow had stopped falling and that had been around midnight. He had a vague, sloshy memory of stoking the woodstove back to life to thaw their frozen limbs, then of collapsing into his chair rather than face the shame of crawling into bed upstairs drunk. He could not recall having pulled on one of Maria’s blankets.

The sound of scrubbing continued in the mudroom.

As Tommy focused on the noise, the dull throb in his temple began to pound more diligently, causing him to lean forward and press fingers to his forehead. He certainly was no featherweight when it came to the booze, but damn. Maybe it was the beating he had taken that made his head pound, rather than the whiskey. Turned out his head had not quite been hard enough after all.

His fingers brushed across the row of stitches and the rough, pinched edges of the gash that Dr. Vrabel had sewn up above his left brow. Somewhere in his restless dreams, Tommy had felt the gash splitting open and pouring blood into his eye and mouth, choking and blinding him as he thrashed helplessly on the cold tiles. The wound felt purely clinical now that the nightmare had receded.

Still, as he closed his eyes and tried to un-remember the twisting blur of reality and nightmare, he let his fingers press less gently against the stitched gash, somehow finding comfort in the pain that emanated out from it. Harder he pressed, then harder still, his eyes screwing tight, his jaw clenching, until his fingernails were digging at the frayed edges of torn skin and tearing skin anew around the black threads.

He stopped only when he felt a line of wet warm ooze out from between his fingers and roll lazily into his eyebrow.

Suddenly sick, Tommy threw back the blanket across his lap and stood, wiping the blood from his forehead with the back of his shirt sleeve. The nausea swirled, then slowly dissipated as he worked life back into stiff muscles again. Beside him, the stove, no doubt stoked by Maria already this morning, thrummed with a vigor that soaked into at least the edges of his body, even if it never quite settled the cold in his stomach.

He found Maria in the mudroom. Her back was to him, clad in a plaid collared shirt, shoulders hunched over the wide wash basin they used for small loads of laundry. Beneath her elbow, he could see the wet sleeve of his denim jacket in her hands, scrubbing a bristle brush across the brown-red stain there. The sting of hydrogen peroxide hung in the air.

Beside the door to the outside, the empty bottle of whiskey sat in a crate to return to Jackson’s sole distiller. Tommy was pretty sure he had left it and the dirty glass on the kitchen counter last night before stumbling into the living room.

He swallowed the bile at the back of his throat and leaned against the doorjamb. “Thanks,” he muttered, loud enough for Maria to hear.

She startled slightly but turned with a tired smile. It quickly fell away to surprise and concern as she caught sight of him. “Jesus, Tommy,” she said, dropping the jacket into the wash basin. “You’re bleeding.”

He jerked his head away and held up a hand as she reached towards his brow. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I probably just scratched it while I was sleepin’, that’s all.”

Maria’s lips pressed together, but she settled for wetting a washcloth and handing it to him instead. “How’d you sleep?”

“Not good.” He pressed the washcloth to the bleeding gash above his eye.

“I was worried…when you didn’t come upstairs.”

“Yeah.”

Maria chewed the inside of a lip, but turned back to the wash basin, her expression as much a mask as his. “How’s Ellie doing?”

Tommy shrugged and shook his head. “She didn’t really say much.”

“You should…try talking to her. It’d probably be good for both of you.”

He hated Maria for saying that, just for a second. Hated how it made him and Ellie sound like broken things.

But the flush of anger faded as quickly as it had come. Again he reminded himself that Maria was a doer, which was perhaps the worst kind of person to be when there was nothing to do to make a shitty situation better. She was coming as close as she could now, as she picked up the jacket again, splashed a small amount of hydrogen peroxide onto the sleeve, and resumed scrubbing. The brown-red smear was coming up nicely from the denim, like it had never been there. Only, of course, it had.

Sighing, Tommy started to turn back towards the kitchen when Maria looked up again. Her expression was serious this time, a mix of wariness and apprehension. “What were you doing last night? In the office? With all your old gear?”

His lips parted, then closed again, a slow frown settling over his face. He had wondered the same last night, during those biting cold hours spent sitting on the porch in silence, letting the whiskey drag him further down into its muzzy embrace. He had finally found his answer before the night’s end, and it had not changed with the morning’s sobriety.

“I need to go after ‘em, Maria.”

A tension he had not realized was there abruptly released from Maria’s shoulders, visibly drooping her slender figure as if she had been punched, and he realized with a pang of guilt that this was the answer she had been fearing. The jacket fell back into the wash basin again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just somethin’ I gotta do.”

“No,” Maria whispered. “No, it isn’t.” She swept around him to shut the door between the mudroom and the rest of the house, doing so quietly so as not to wake Ellie. “This isn’t something you have to do, Tommy.”

She was not whispering anymore. Her voice had taken on that firm, reasonable tone she used so often as Jackson’s undisputed leader, though it had an undertone almost of pleading. The eggshells she had walked around him the day previous had cracked and her real fear was plain to see.

Tommy shook his head, growing more resolved himself. “He’s my brother, Maria.”

“And he wouldn’t want you to get yourself killed going after these people.” She had pressed her back against the mudroom door.

“I know how to do this. Remember? I know how to do it right. I’ll be okay.”

“You don’t know that. You can’t _know_ that, Tommy. You don’t know a thing about these people – who they are, where they came from, what kind of numbers you’re talking about.”

Tommy leaned into the edge of the long, thin table Maria used for folding laundry, pressing his knuckles into the wooden top and not meeting his wife’s eyes. “I’m not gonna be stupid about it. I’ve dealt with overwhelmin’ numbers before. I’ll get in, get out, and be done with the whole thing.”

“It’s not that simple and you _know_ it,” Maria said, voice rising in frustration. “There are a thousand things you can’t predict. Infected, hunters, FEDRA. One thing goes wrong and I won’t ever know what happened to you.”

“Damnit babe, _I’ve done this before!_ ”

He had not meant to shout, or to slam his fist down onto the wooden table. But he did both, and rather than pause in embarrassment at his sudden anger, he felt it surge like a wave over him, burning up his neck and ears.

“They fuckin’ tortured him,” he said, feeling the bitter tremor in his voice. “They didn’t just kill him. They tortured him, Maria. For—shit—I don’t even know how long.”

“I know,” she said quietly.

“For Christ’s sake, they made Ellie watch. We could barely get him on his goddamn horse in one fuckin’ piece.”

“I know.”

“And I just _laid there_ , like some fuckin’ sack of wet flour. I don’t even remember what happened because they knocked me out like some fuckin’ moron. How do I let that go, huh? How do I fuckin’ let them get away with that?”

“Because you have to,” Maria said, sharply and sadly. “You want revenge and you deserve it, but not like this. Not when it means trekking halfway across the county into God only knows what. Revenge is for younger men, Tommy.”

“It’s justice I’m talkin’ about, not revenge.”

She suddenly crossed the space between them and put her hands on either side of his face. For once, he did not brush her away. The warmth of her touch stilled the scowl that had twisted across his face and he felt his anger begin to falter. She was just as tall as him and could look him straight in the eyes.

“And what about us? What about here?” she asked softly. “You’ve _built_ something here, Tommy. You left that all behind and built something here, remember? People here need you. I need you. Please.”

The roil of emotions that vied for attention within him made his stomach sour and brought a taste not unlike the iron of blood into his mouth. He did not jerk away from Maria’s touch, but he dropped his gaze, eyes almost closing, focusing on the soft scratch of his beard against her palm.

Finally, as his breathing slowed and the heat retreated from the back of his neck, he swallowed. “Ellie’s not gonna let it go either. Not after what they did to her.” He wet his lips. “She’s gonna want to go too.”

“Then _stop_ her.”

Maria’s voice was pleading, insistent, gentle, firm. The same mash of emotions as his but tugging in the opposite direction. He felt a rush of affection and warmth for this fearsome woman who was his wife, but it was tempered by something new, something different. Disappointment, perhaps? In her? Or in himself?

Tommy reached up and closed his hands over Maria’s, gently drawing them away from his cheeks and pressing his lips against the curled backs of her fingertips.

“Just…gimme some time to think,” he muttered.

Then he pushed past her and opened the mudroom door, leaving her standing there alone again.

* * *

The funeral was a heartfelt, somber affair. Most of Jackson turned out for it, save for a handful tied to essential duties. The town was small enough that most probably would have come regardless of who was being buried, but the fact that it was Joel Miller brought even the less social residents of Jackson out of the woodwork. Tommy was sure many came out of respect for him, and Maria and Edgar. Some too likely came because of the rumors, the whispers about how he had been killed and the speculation as to why.

But most were there to honor Joel on whatever quiet terms they had known him. As the soft-spoken stranger who had taken frequent patrol duty and left snarky notes mocking his brother in the logbooks. As the guitar maker who would sit on the low brick wall of the old Wort Hotel and show a group of young kids the difference between a downstroke and a palm mute. As the guy who would pay dearly for a bag of coffee beans. As the old fella who would sit out on his porch in the evenings and strum absently at his six-string.

The coffin was closed, of course, and there was no viewing. Only a solemn procession through town, from Dr. Vrabel’s office down through the heart of Jackson, along the snowy main street and into the former park converted into the Jackson cemetery. First behind the horse-drawn wagon bearing the coffin came Tommy and Maria and Ellie, wrapped in their winter jackets, their breath pluming in front of gray faces. Dina and Maria’s father Edgar had followed, then Jesse and his parents, then everyone else.

Edgar had said some words. Tommy could not recall much of what the old man had said, though he thought it had been simple and warm. Instead, Tommy had mostly stood with head bowed, one gloved hand holding Maria’s, the other wrapped around Ellie’s shoulders. Ellie had said very little. She did not cry like she had the night before.

When all was said and done and the coffin was in the ground, their little family had stood outside Joel’s house and received the sympathies and well wishes of every person who filed by. Many stopped and lay bright flowers from Jackson’s greenhouses on the steps leading up to the house’s front porch or along its little picket fence. Some left letters or small notes of sympathy.

Joel probably would have said it was all a bunch of fuss.

When Jesse’s parents had come to through the line, they had clasped Tommy’s hands in theirs and expressed their condolences. And when they have moved on to Maria, Tommy had quietly pulled Jesse aside and lowered his voice so that no one else would hear.

“Jesse, can I ask a favor?” he had murmured.

Jesse’s face had grown intent. “Of course.”

“Would you…head back to the Baldwin place for me?”

The younger man had lifted a brow, but the grim line of his jaw had not changed. “See if they left anything behind?”

“Yeah. Please. I’d…be grateful.”

Jesse had nodded and said nothing more.

When the line of mourners finally dwindled, Edgar gently shepherded them back to Tommy and Maria’s house, where others from the town had already gathered. When they got there, the whole house smelled of roast meat and fried potatoes and warm bread. The hubbub and chatter of their closest friends filled the place to the rafters, and for a time Tommy could almost lose himself in the noise of it, which he supposed was largely the point. A reminder of the community that remained, even in the wake of loss.

Even so, neither the food nor the company did much to fill the hollow emptiness that curled at the pit of his stomach. And the same, it seemed, was true of Ellie. She quietly excused herself after less than half an hour, murmuring an excuse to Maria before retreating to the little garage apartment behind Joel’s silent house.

Evening came. The house slowly emptied. Tommy lost track of the faces that swam across his vision as he sat at the kitchen island, picking at cold fried bread and beans, graciously accepting the kind words and fond memories of those who approached him to express their respect for Joel, marveling at how little they had truly known about his brother.

When they had all gone, the kitchen seemed unusually still. It was dark outside, though frost still clung to the edges of the windowsills. Maria had turned off the lights in the living room and hallway, leaving the kitchen as an island of warm yellow light in an otherwise black interior. Only she and her father and Tommy remained. Glass dishes and Tupperware were stacked around the countertops, filled with casseroles and potato salads enough to last them weeks.

“Well, that’s that,” Edgar said quietly, once they had all sat in thoughtful silence for several minutes.

“Yeah,” Tommy murmured.

The old man gently cleared his throat. Edgar was well into his 80s now, white-haired, white-bearded, and with the deep creases and permanently bronzed face of a man who has spent a life outdoors. Despite his age, he usually moved with a good-natured joviality that made him seem vigorous beyond his years. But now, that vigor had dulled to a haggard sort of heaviness. “I’ve, uh, got one more thing for you, son.”

He disappeared briefly into the dim hallway by the front door. When he returned a second later, his long face was gray and solemn. He held a small red shoebox.

“These were…Joel’s things. Dr. Vrabel asked me to pass them on.”

Maria drew in a breath, her eyes flicking to her father and one hand curling almost protectively around Tommy’s fingers. But Tommy only sighed and gave her a small smile to indicate he was fine.

Edgar set the shoebox on the island and gently pushed it across to Tommy.

Tommy gave Maria’s hand a brief squeeze, then let go and pulled the box towards him. He flipped back the lid, knowing what he would find.

Joel’s watch sat on top.

It was such an unremarkable thing. Tommy had found a thousand little knickknacks just like it, in a thousand desk drawers and kitchen cabinets, in a thousand abandoned homes and offices. It was a broken, useless thing. The only entirely unpragmatic object long retained by an otherwise entirely utilitarian man. No purpose in it save a memory, of a different world and a little girl they had left behind there.

Tommy sighed, pressing a thumb across the cracked face, tracing the two small holes where the watch’s crystal had fallen away completely. Images drifted up from a well of memories. Of a lonely crossroads somewhere in Louisiana, more than two decades ago now. Of a pointless little scuffle that had left three people dead and spiderweb cracks across the face of a plain black watch.

He set the watch aside, prodding through the rest of the box. A folded pair of jeans. A pocketknife. Joel’s revolver. Pressing his lips together, Tommy nodded his gratitude and pulled the lid back over the box.

“Thanks, Edgar,” he whispered, not looking up.

From the hallway, they heard the screen door whine and knuckles rap briefly on the front door, before the door itself opened with a whine. Jesse appeared a second later in the opening to the kitchen, head bowed respectfully. His cheeks and lips were raw from the cold.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, coming into the light. “Had some patrol assignments to get ready for tomorrow morning. The reception go okay? Sorry I couldn’t be here.” He did not mention why he came in wearing a pack, if he had indeed only been planning patrol assignments.

Edgar waved Jesse further into the kitchen, indicating he join the three of them at the island. “Ah kid, come in. It went fine, it went fine. Glad you could come now at least. It’s good you’re here actually, since you’re in charge of patrols.”

Jesse shrugged off his pack and leaned it up against one wall, nudging aside a bar stool so he could lean against the kitchen island. As he did so, Tommy glanced at him, brows just slightly lifting in unspoken question. Jesse gave a barely perceptible shake of his head, frowning, and Tommy sighed under his breath.

Now,” Edgar rumbled, gripping the edge of the counter, eyeing Maria, Tommy, and Jesse beneath the low light of the kitchen island. “We need to talk about what we do next. Do we go after ‘em?”

Maria made a surprised sound, her expression shifting to mild disbelief. “Dad,” she said abruptly, voice half chiding, half warning. “Not you now.”

Her father held up a hand, face grave. “Now Maria, it’s a valid question. I know you said you and Tommy already talked about this, but Joel was a member of this community too. He wasn’t just Tommy’s brother.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know. I know, sweetie. But people are wonderin’. And they’re scared. They want to know what happened, and _why_ , just as much as we do. We need to at least talk options.”

Maria gave a tight sigh and pinched her nose. Then she held up her hands, trying to reason. “Dad, I want the same thing. I do.” She turned to Tommy, expression softening. “Tommy, I do. Please believe me. But it’s suicide for you to go on your own.”

“I’ll go with him.”

Jesse interjected with such habitual calm and control that both Maria and Edgar looked startled, as if having misheard. But Jesse’s expression was perfectly serious, almost matter of fact. Tommy felt the cold fist around his stomach just slightly loosen its grip.

Jesse shrugged. “Better than Tommy going alone.”

“No one’s going alone,” Edgar said flatly, waving the idea away. “That’s a fool’s errand. Maria’s right there, Tommy. You’re no spring chicken anymore and there’s eight of them to one of you. And maybe a lot more’n eight wherever they’re headed.”

“Thank you,” Maria said with mild exasperation.

But Edgar stabbed his pointer finger downward and thumped the wooden countertop. “However, Joel _was_ a part of this community. We could send a group after ‘em. No need for Tommy to go alone.”

Maria shook her head, expression sympathetic but relentless. “How many? How many would be enough? Ten? Twenty? Dad, that’s half a wall duty shift. That’s almost an entire two-week rotation for patrols. We can’t afford to lose that many people. Can you afford to lose that many for patrol duty?” she said, looking to Jesse, who did not reply. “And what happens if they don’t come back?”

Edgar quieted.

“Is that worth it?” she said softly.

None of them looked up. Tommy had said nothing during the entire exchange. He had sat silently, hunched forward on his elbows, using his middle finger to draw circles around one of the knots in the stained wooden countertop. At certain moments, the icy fist clenched around his stomach had tightened, and at others it had relaxed, as the discussion went on almost as if he were not present. He had barely moved since Jesse’s subtle indication that he had found nothing on his return trip to Baldwin Lodge.

Tommy’s gaze lifted slightly now, to the little red shoebox at the center of kitchen island. Christ, he wished sometimes he had Joel’s ability to let things go. _Keep our heads down. Lay low for a while. Don’t rock the boat._ He had said it in a thousand different ways, conveyed it in words and tone and expression and posture. It was their oldest argument, pre-dating even the end of the world as they had known it. Joel would roll with the punches. Tommy would punch back.

And if it had been a little shoebox of Tommy’s things sitting on that counter, and a question of risking lives to do that little shoebox some kind of justice, would Joel have gone? Would he have left Jackson and all his obligations there? Would he have called Tommy a fool for even considering such pointless retribution?

Tommy wanted to punch back. _Goddamn_ , how he wanted to punch back. He wanted to burn the Baldwin place to the ground. He wanted to press a gun right up between eight sets of eyes and pull the trigger and watch their fucking brains blow out the back. He wanted to bump fists with someone who would tell him _no shame in justice, brother_.

But more than anything, he wanted Joel to be standing in that kitchen, grumbling about what an idiot he was being.

Tommy held up a hand as Maria’s father opened his mouth to speak again.

“Edgar, it’s okay.”

Father and daughter could get like this, like two sides of the same coin. One the efficient and capable administrator of Jackson, ever pragmatic, ever diligent, never putting her own needs above that of the community. The other the heart and soul of the town, always with a thumb on the temperature of the people who called it home. And Tommy knew what Edgar was doing now. Making the arguments that Tommy could not, without appearing selfish. He was grateful to the old man for that. And now it was time to stop.

“It’s okay,” Tommy repeated. “I think…”

He swallowed, feeling his throat close around words his lips did not want to form.

“I think Maria’s right.” He grimaced at the words, and then again at the fact that he could not say them without grimacing.

Maria’s lips parted in mild surprise and she looked up in question at her father and Jesse first before back to Tommy. Carefully, she said, “You mean you don’t want to go after them?”

“Course I wanna go after ‘em,” he snapped back, more fiercely than he had intended. He took a deep breath. “ _But_ …there’s more at stake here than what I want.”

They all sat there in silence, hunched beneath the low yellow light above the kitchen island, soaking in the repercussions of Tommy’s words. Tommy felt sick to his stomach and his fingers itched for the empty bottle of whiskey sitting out in the mudroom. The others looked similarly discomfited.

It was Jesse who finally broke the stillness.

“What about Ellie?” he asked quietly.

Tommy pushed back from the counter and stood, feeling aged a hundred years. But the burden of his decision did not take long sinking in. And there was no question now what to do about Ellie.

“I’ll talk to her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and I hope you're enjoying this story so far! Don't forget to leave a review and let me know what you think! Like I said at the start, the next chapter is already half finished, so hopefully should have an update in a week or two. Follow the story to get alerts when it is updated! Until next time.


	4. Chapter 3 - The Leaving

Chapter 3 – The Leaving

** THEN **

_May 7, 2021_

They had gathered in loose throngs around the room, arms crossed or hands in pockets, some seated on tabletops, others leaning against the peeling gray walls. Their faces were largely shadowed by the dimming light of dusk outside, though a few dirty cheeks and wet eyes glistened in the light of the kerosene lanterns. Two long rows of student desks still marched towards the front of the lecture room, where a dusty projector still pointed towards a whiteboard covered with scrawls about _cell division_ and _protein synthesis_ and _cytokinesis_. They had found the room almost untouched, save for clear evidence of rifling through the drawers and cupboards that ran along the walls.

Now its long tranquility was disturbed by the crowding in of several dozen Fireflies, muted save for the light rustle of clothing and the scuff of boots across the floor. At their center was a table with a white sheet draped over a bulky form. In several places, blood had soaked through the cotton material.

Tommy stood near the back, perched on the edge of one of the low sets of countertops that ran the length of the room, thumbs hooked into the dark green tactical vest he wore. His head was bowed in thought.

Then the murmur of conversation abruptly quieted and Tommy looked up to see the assembled Fireflies parting ranks.

Marlene strode into the room.

Tommy had seen her on and off since Boston, but rarely more than a glimpse or a nod of acknowledgement. She still held herself with that air of tired resilience, as someone who has encountered every barrier and hardship imaginable and still refused to concede. But there was something more now, a new animation that had been noticeable in her face and bearing since they had left Denver. Her eyes were just a little wider, her jaw just a little firmer, subtle signs of a new fervor that had awakened with their arrival at the University of Eastern Colorado.

And despite the somber mood in the old classroom, that fervor still burned in Marlene’s face.

She took up a position at the head of the table with the bloody white sheet, turning to face all those gathered in the dusty space. At first her lips pressed together, her head bowing as if in silent prayer. Then she looked up from beneath her brows, lips parting, and finally straightened again.

“Thank you all for being here,” she said, quietly but loud enough for even Tommy to hear at the back of the crowd. “I know this isn’t easy. Burying one of our own…it’s the hardest job we have.”

The Fireflies around her stopped their gentle shifting, all focus on their leader now.

Marlene continued. “All of you probably have some kind of idea about why we’re here, but let me tell you now. For years, FEDRA has said that they continue to research the infection – how it progresses, how it affects different individuals, whether it can be slowed or even stopped. They’ve told us this to assure us that, as bad as things are, they will get better, when FEDRA finally makes a breakthrough. They’ve _told_ us…that FEDRA, and FEDRA alone, is capable of carrying through on the promise of a world free of the cordyceps infection. And they’ve told us that, until then, things are going to be a _little different_.”

She let a sneer enter her voice at the last part and the murmur that went up around the room echoed the same disdain. Marlene’s jaw shifted, hardening the lines of her face.

“They have lied.”

Heads shook, faces scowling. Several audibly snorted their contempt.

“If FEDRA was ever looking for a vaccine,” Marlene said, voice beginning to rise, “they have long since stopped. The civilian institutions that once led that effort have been overturned by our military dictators, like every other democratic institution that predated the outbreak. As in every other matter, FEDRA has abdicated its responsibility. Our supposed leaders have chosen power and corruption, and they have ground out any effort that might deprive them of that power. They refuse to continue research of a vaccine because they know a vaccine will take away their control. _They have failed us_.”

She suddenly gestured to the room around them, palm held out and open. “Look around you,” she continued, then curled her outstretched fingers into a fist. “This is where it begins. Not just in the fields or in the streets or in the hills – we will fight them here, in the labs, as well. _We_ will find a vaccine where they refuse to. We have doctors and scientists, refugees from the military’s own prisons. Here we begin the mission not just of restoring our democratic institutions, but of truly giving people the hope they need. _This_ will be the light. This is how our country will rise again.”

Marlene had always seemed such a study in contrasts to Tommy. Most of the time, she wore the mantle of a hardened battlefield commander, her manner curt and calculating and compartmentalizing, someone who could quickly make those agonizing decisions that were certain to cost lives. But she had also been that voice on the radio, the static whisper of news and information that dozens had listened to, secretly huddled into a dark corner of an abandoned building deep in the heart of the Boston Quarantine Zone. Her words had been electric then, listeners hanging onto every syllable, every exhortation to not lose hope.

It was that voice from the radio that captivated the Fireflies surrounding her now, that caused them to thrum with a building sense of excitement. Tommy straightened as he listened, craning to see Marlene’s face better. He could feel something leap in his chest as she spoke, something like wanting to believe, but not quite belief itself.

“Griggs believed in that hope more than any of us,” Marlene continued, her voice dipping to a more intimate tone, more sorrowful. Her eyes fell to the bloody sheet in front of her. “That’s why he specifically requested that his squad be part of this assignment. You few, you here to witness where it begins. And it will. Here. Too often it sounds hollow when we say that one of our own did not die in vain, but if _ever_ that were true, _it is here_. Griggs gave his life to help us clear this place, and his sacrifice will be remembered as the first step the Fireflies took towards a vaccine. _A vaccine_.”

She paused, looking around the room. “Remember, when you are lost in the darkness…”

“Look for the light,” Tommy said somberly, in unison with every other Firefly in the room.

Marlene straightened and drew a deep breath, as if emerging from a trance. “I’m leaving tonight with a few others,” she said, tone growing curt and businesslike now, that commander’s mantle quickly slipping over her again. “We’ve identified several police and fire stations in Boulder that may still have handheld radios in them. Our mission is to bring back enough radios to post sentries further out from the science building, so that the Runners that jumped Griggs won’t have an opportunity to do so again. I promise you we won’t come back empty-handed. Now, you all have your watch assignments. Get some sleep.”

Wordlessly, several Fireflies came forward at Marlene’s wave and lifted the body of Erik Griggs, former leader of Foxtrot Squad. Again the ranks of those assembled parted and Marlene slowly strode from the room, followed by those who carried the body. Then Tommy stood heavily, unhooking his thumbs from his vest and letting his hands drop to his sides as he joined the slow shuffle of Fireflies filing out after Marlene.

* * *

“She’s pretty good, isn’t she?”

“Hm?” Tommy said, looking up.

“Marlene,” Joe clarified. “She really knows how to get people’s attention. You know, inspire them.” The little stick that Joe had been whittling on lay abandoned in his lap, as if he had been chewing on this thought for some time and finally mustered the courage to say something out loud.

“She does,” Andrea said, nodding from the other side of the fire, tone sober and sincere. Her round face was framed by red hair that gleamed in the light of the flames. “We’re lucky to have her. She’s a lot like Mav in that way.”

The four of them sat huddled in a semi-circle – Tommy, Joe, Andrea, and Max. An old university garbage can had been cut in half to form a firepit, the lower jaw and curled horn tips of a bighorn sheep still visible on its sides. Swiveling computer chairs and old desks had been dragged from the building for seating, and the low flames of their fire danced across the glass front doors of what had once been the Richard Harrington Science Lab. Somewhere above them, two other Fireflies on watch would be patrolling the building’s rooftop.

Tommy’s brows drew together in question. “Who’s Mav?”

“Maverick,” Max said, not looking up from his work. “One of the original founders of the Fireflies. Codename, obviously, like Bastille.” He was hunched over a set of thin green curtains, tearing them into cloth strips for later use as anything from medical bindings to Molotov cocktails.

Andrea nodded. “That’s right. People used to say she was the voice and soul of the Fireflies. That woman had nerve. She died a few years ago, but she and Marlene were pretty close.”

Tommy had been running a whetstone along the blade of a short machete, but he looked up now in thought, brushing absently at the metal blade, wiping away the fine steel grist. He recalled Marlene had once told him that two of the Fireflies’ three original founders had died. Joel had dryly remarked on it at the time, a sour suggestion of the fate he expected awaited Tommy in joining the group.

“Who was the other one that died?” he asked, surprised he had never really given it much thought before now. “I met Bastille once, before we left Boston, but Marlene said the other two founders had died.”

“Bartholdi,” Andrea answered, tone noticeably warming, though not without a touch of bittersweet. “God, I miss Bart. We lost him a few years ago too.”

Joe craned forward, expression bright with the brief history lesson. “What happened?”

“What happens to any of us if we live long enough?” Max cut in with a snort, tone derisive and abruptly acrid. “The Feds got him. Ambushed him and Bastille at a meeting. Crippled Bas, but some of our boys got him away. But they got Bartholdi. Alive. Tortured him for a few weeks, then public execution. Left the body in the gutter for a week.”

Joe’s face quickly sobered and the others all fell silent too.

“This was all his idea, you know,” Andrea said quietly after a moment.

Tommy let his eyes flick sideways to her. “What, findin’ a vaccine?”

“Mmhm. Most people figured it was a lost cause when Bart died, like we’d got too ambitious or something, but not Marlene. From what I hear, she and Bas have been at it like cats ever since she got back from Richmond, trying to convince Bas to let her come out west and set up labs. Bartholdi always said we had to think long term sustainability of the cause.”

Tommy considered that for a moment. His one meeting with Bastille, the remaining leader of the Fireflies, had been brief and not altogether pleasant. He recalled a stooped old man leaning heavily on a forearm crutch. A square white beard and teardrop-shaped wrinkles beneath the eyes. A face that never smiled. He had used words like hope and freedom as weapons, but it had been Marlene who infused them with any sort of real feeling. He could see how she and the old man might not see eye-to-eye.

“You think we really stand a chance of findin’ a vaccine?” Tommy asked aloud, to no one in particular. “I mean I get it, seems like somethin’ we oughta be doin’. Just…kind of seems like a long shot.”

Andrea shrugged. “It _is_ a long shot. Someone has to though. The Feds don’t want a vaccine anymore.”

Max grunted, finally looking up. “Not when the infection gives them an excuse to stomp on our necks.”

Somewhere above them, someone whistled, high and piercing. All four of them straightened, glancing up, then out towards the modest little barricades that wrapped around the front of the science building. A second whistle came, but no third. Infected. Tommy had not heard anything, but the one night vision monocular they had at the university was stationed with the lookouts atop the lab. Marlene and her group had yet to return with radios, so they had resorted to using hand signals during the day and whistles at night.

After a pause, two more whistles followed, these quick and coming right on top of one another. Two infected then.

Max stood, pushing the bundled folds of green curtain off his lap and onto the ground beside him. The others made to stand as well, but he waved Andrea and Joe to sit again, shaking his head. “Don’t worry about it. Tommy and I can handle it.”

Tommy nodded, setting aside the whetstone he had been using and standing, machete in hand. He followed the older man as Max descended the stairs leading up to the science building’s glass doors, leaving the warm glow of their fire behind.

In one respect, at least, FEDRA had been right. The city of Boulder, where the University of Eastern Colorado was situated, was overrun with infected. It butted up against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and someone had theorized that this had prevented the infected from wandering too far out of town. Whatever the case, it created a useful smokescreen for the Fireflies’ presence here. Or at least it would, if they could safely cordon off the university campus to shield their own people. Tommy suspected Griggs would not be the last casualty in that regard.

Max pulled a long black flashlight from a loop on his vest and flicked it on. The spotlight cut through the murky darkness, flashing across the tables and chairs that had been stacked to create makeshift barricades so far. Part of their new little wall had razor wire strung across it, requisitioned from the old military barricades that had once fenced in the abandoned medical triage around the science building.

The beam of light suddenly caught movement and Tommy sucked in a breath between his teeth. Two Runners, their movements erratic and grotesque, fingers curling as they stumbled and jerked. Both had once been women from the look of them, young women with long straight hair, one blond, one brunette. But even from behind the barricades, Tommy could see the red that shot through their eyes, and the dirt and grease that had twisted into their clothing and hair. Blood stained their chins.

“I got it,” Tommy said quietly as one of the Runners gave a moan of agony. “Just keep the light on ‘em.”

Max nodded and drew a pistol from his belt just in case.

Edging close to a pair of tables that had been stacked to about chest height, Tommy lifted his machete and thwacked the blade against one of the table legs. The metal clanged and then hummed, and Tommy swung the blade a second time for similar effect.

The Runners both gave cries of acknowledgement, their erratic stumbling abruptly shifting to a lope, husky breaths desperate and thudding as their tormented minds propelled their bodies without thought or hesitation. They slammed against the ramshackle barricade, one of them catching on the razor wire and barely seeming to notice the long ugly gashes the razors slashed into its gray skin.

Frowning with distaste, Tommy backed up a pace as the two infected grappled at the tables and chairs and razor wire, hands flailing as they wildly sought to break through and reach him. Then he tightened his grip on the machete and quickly stepped forward. The blade briefly hummed through the air before it _k-thunked_ into the neck of the nearest Runner. The thing immediately stopped its struggle, its dirty blond hair now flecked with red. Tommy jerked the blade free and swung a second time, this time cleaving the head clean off from the body. Blood gushed down across the table that the headless body now slumped over and the head itself rolled away into the darkness near Max.

The second Runner barely reacted, save to claw even more desperately at the razor wire snarling into its flesh, whatever remained of its frantic mind fixated only on how close Tommy now stood to it.

Sighing, Tommy swung the machete again. A second later, another headless body pumped gouts of blood across the little barricade and another head rolled away into the darkness.

It was all very matter of fact.

Max stooped, grasping the blond head by the hair and shining his flashlight into the lifeless, alien eyes. “Sure does seem a long way off, don’t it?” When Tommy shot him a questioning glance, Max shrugged. “A vaccine. How the hell do you fix _this_?” He held the severed head up for emphasis, barely reacting to the gruesome sight.

“You think this all is a waste of time?” Tommy said as he dug a flashlight of his own from a pocket and began scanning the darkness.

“Nah,” Max murmured. “No, we need to be doin’ this. I’d just rather be back in Denver or somewhere, personally.”

The beam from Tommy’s flashlight caught dark hair and he knelt to grab the brunette head. He held it away from him to keep the blood from dripping on his boots. “Fightin’ the infection or fightin’ FEDRA. It’s all part of the cause, I guess.” He tried not to drag out the word _cause_ too sarcastically.

“I’d rather be fightin’ FEDRA.”

Max said it low and quiet – he rarely shouted or spat words – but the undercurrent of hate was so plain that Tommy had to pause to stare at his friend.

“It matters more when _they_ kill us than when the infected do,” Max said.

He leaned back, arm extended, and lobbed the severed head over the barricade. It landed with a fleshy smack somewhere in the darkness beyond. A second later, Tommy followed suit with the head he held.

“I get that,” Tommy said, nodding and wiping his machete blade clean on the sleeve of one of the headless bodies still slumped against the outside of the barricade. “I don’t guess I’ve ever lost anybody I _really_ cared about to the infected. One, kinda, I guess, but…that was really another asshole’s fault more than anythin’.”

Max was quiet a moment, his face a shadow, just the edges outlined by the beam of his flashlight as it pointed at the ground. Finally his lips parted with a small breath. “I’ve buried a kid killed by the infected and a kid killed by the military…Trust me, it’s worse when it’s the people who know just what the fuck they’re doin’.”

Tommy stared, barely able to see the gleam of Max’s dark eyes or silver beard. Then Tommy gave a sharp sigh and shook his head, jaw clenching slightly. “Vaccine or no vaccine,” he muttered, sheathing his machete, “people are still the shittiest part of this whole thing.”

Max flicked off his flashlight and turned back towards the fire at the front of the science building. “Amen to that, brother.”

* * *

** NOW **

The cold made his knuckles hurt. That always seemed the case these days, in his right hand especially. An ache that turned to burning like background static every time he flexed his fingers. Too many punches thrown, he supposed. Too many decades of curling those knuckles into a fist, and leaving them scarred and red and bruised. Maria said it was likely the start of arthritis. But arthritis was for old men, wasn’t it?

Still, he should have worn gloves at least, even for the short walk to Joel’s house. When his breath fogged in front of him, it was thick enough almost to obscure the path, though he hardly needed to be able to see to know his way. But the bitter cold caused him to shrug the shoulders of his denim jacket around him as he walked. The stain on the sleeve was gone, thanks to Maria’s washing that morning. And the snow had held off tonight. Small mercies.

These and a thousand other little thoughts skipped through Tommy’s head as he came through the opening in the fence and crunched into the frozen snow of the backyard. He had tried to focus on the pain that still pulsed across the left side of his face or on the thin line of rubber along the bottom of the Tupperware he was carrying or on how the clearing sky above threatened ice in the morning. Anything but what he truly needed to focus on.

She was going to be disappointed. Angry, even. They had said very little to each other since Dina and Jesse had found them on the chill tiles of the Baldwin cellar. Not even a word after hours sitting together on a frozen porch the night previous. But he knew her better than to believe her silence had been acceptance, any more than his had been.

He drew in a deep breath as he came around the side of the converted garage. This was the right thing to do. This was what Joel would have wanted. This was a conversation Tommy would have been having with any other resident of Jackson in similar circumstances. This was the right thing to do.

The rationalization in his head felt like a recorded voice.

Tommy paused at the door to the detached garage, pressed his lips together, and knocked.

It was dark behind the garage’s windows and nothing within seemed to stir.

He knocked again.

A small sound of movement. He held his breath. Then, a second later, the light behind the door flipped on and the door opened.

Ellie stood there in her sweatshirt and sneakers.

She said nothing. Exhaustion seemed to weigh on her every movement, but she did not look like she had been sleeping. Her eyes did not quite meet his.

Tommy slowly drew a breath and lifted a hand in quiet greeting.

“Hey.”

She hesitated, meeting his eyes briefly. “Hey,” she murmured, before looking away again.

He swallowed, dropping his gaze, keeping his voice steady and calm as he pointed past Ellie. “Could I sit down, please?”

“Yeah,” she whispered, and stepped back to let Tommy enter.

The little apartment had never really felt cold or lonely before, despite its former life as a garage. He had rarely had reason to visit Ellie here, other than the occasional drop-in with Joel or Maria, but it had always had that reassuringly lived in warmth to it. A grungy haphazardness and a sprawl of paraphernalia that smelled slightly of unwashed clothes and deodorant and said unmistakably that a teenager occupied this space.

Now, however, as he slowly crossed the room to perch on the edge of the crumpled futon sofa, the place felt brittle and chill, in a way that could not be accounted for solely by the lack of a fire in the woodstove.

Ellie joined him on the sofa. He was staring down at the Tupperware in his hands, unwilling or unable to force himself to look up at Ellie beside him. But he could feel her empty stare fixed somewhere across the room.

Gingerly, he slid the Tupperware onto the edge of the coffee table before them and lightly tapped its top. He could not even remember what was in there. Maria had sent him with one of the many Tupperwares the mourners had brought, and as if on auto pilot, he had not even thought to look what was inside.

He swallowed carefully and put his hands together, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “Maria wants to make sure you’re eatin’,” he said, briefly glancing at Ellie, then away again.

But he had seen her expression, a shift from that despondent vacancy to the first hardening of an edge.

“She can’t stop us,” Ellie said. It was a fact, not an assertion.

And there it was. Tommy felt a hard ball drop like lead in his stomach, felt that cold twisting in his chest at the abrupt certainty that Ellie had not been asleep that morning when he and Maria had argued in the mudroom, when the closed door had not been enough to muffle their words.

A sharp sigh escaped him and he nodded to himself, silent confirmation that this conversation was about to be everything he had feared. It was still the right thing to do. It had to be. This had to be done. He cleared his throat, steeling himself, spreading his hands palms up in what he hoped was a disarming and reasonable gesture.

“To have the guys that we would need,” he started slowly, “to do this smart…We’d be leavin’ Jackson vulnerable.”

He had glanced at her as he spoke, but he looked away now, unable to bring himself to watch the sudden realization no doubt dawning in her eyes and the disbelief no doubt hardening across her face. He felt her look towards him and he jerked his gaze further away, towards the distant door. A wild thought intruded, a sudden urge to just get up and walk out. He quashed it as quickly as it had come, a mixture of shame and anger twisting in his gut.

“So they just get to get away with this?” she said. There was accusation in her voice.

Tommy made a disbelieving sound, shaking his head, trying to find a conciliatory tone. “Nobody wants that.”

“Yeah, but that’s what’s happening,” she returned sharply, holding up a hand in question, as if his reply had sounded as weak to her as it had to him.

He shifted uncomfortably, still not meeting Ellie’s eyes, then spread his hands. “What if we get hit by hunters again?”

Anger flared in her voice this time as Ellie snapped back, “Is this you talking or is this her?”

“It’s a valid point,” he retorted, voice briefly growing angry and tight. It was an instinctive defense of his wife, but not of her rationale. He could hear the lack of conviction behind his words. He turned away from Ellie again, but he could feel her glare follow him, accusation written across her face.

“If it were you or me,” she said, “Joel would be halfway to Seattle already.”

For that at least, Tommy did not need to contrive conviction. He saw again the image of Joel berating him for being such an idiot. Saw so clearly what Joel would have to say about this whole goddamn business. Tommy spoke before he had even formed the words in his head.

“No he wouldn’t,” he said quietly, looking away.

“He absolutely _fucking_ would be—” Ellie breathed out angrily.

“Well, we don’t even know for certain that they’re from Seattle.”

“ _Washington Liberation Front_ ,” she said, punctuating each word. “That’s what you said was on those patches.”

Tommy’s mind raced, feeling the conversation slipping away from him. “What if they stole those jackets?”

Ellie jumped up from the futon, turning away from him in frustration. “That’s…”

“What if the WLF moved?”

“ _What are you doing?_ ”

She spun around again, hands spread, words snapping like a whip across his face.

He faltered. All the carefully rehearsed arguments, all the effort to convince himself he could do this, could pretend to care about the points Maria had made. All hollow now in the face of Ellie’s anger, in the face of the anger he felt rising within himself, at himself. He could not bring himself to respond, or even to look directly at her.

His only answer was a gentle uneasy thumping of his knee. Up and down. Up and down.

Ellie let her hands drop to her sides and shook her head, forcing the indifference she clearly did not feel.

“You know what,” she said, a tremor in her voice. Tommy’s breath caught. She used a thumb and middle finger to wipe at the shine that had gathered beneath her eyes. Then she crossed her arms and her mouth twisted into an exhausted, uncaring, utterly defiant frown. “I’m leaving tomorrow. And if you want to come with me, great.”

God. She was so young. So incredibly young. A picture of rebellious nineteen. Righteous, unyielding, alone. Most of all, disappointed in those older than her. Tommy had been worse at her age, and with half her reason.

He was about to lose this argument.

“You have no idea what you’re walkin’ into,” he said, leaning forward, trying one last time to force control into his voice. “You don’t know how large that group is, how armed—”

“I _don’t_ care.”

She dropped her hands to her hips and shrugged coldly, shaking her head. Her eyes still glistened. “You can’t talk me out of this.”

He stared at her for a long while, then finally lowered his gaze. Maria should have done this. Or Edgar. Hell, even Jesse could have done a better job than this. Someone who was not him. Someone who did not want exactly what she did. If this was the right thing to do, then why was he fucking it up so badly?

When he stood, he barely knew what he was doing, barely knew what he would say next. He held up a hand as if to slow Ellie. “Gimme a day, to talk to Maria. Okay? There’s gotta be some folks she can spare.”

There weren’t. He already knew what that answer would be.

Ellie was still, jaw jutting. “And if she won’t budge?”

He let a small sound escape him, half laugh, half exasperation. “Well I’ll figure somethin’ out,” he replied, throwing up his hands helplessly. He moved closer to her, staring hard, trying to keep the pleading out of his voice. The effect was lost by the effort it took to get the words out. “One day. Please.”

Still she did not move. When a breath had gone by, and then another, and he had begun to fear that she would throw all caution to the wind and deny him, she finally whispered a stiff concession.

“Fine.”

Tommy gave a small breath of relief. He opened his arms to hug her. At first, she did not return the gesture, still standing with her hands on her hips, staring at the ground. But as he wrapped his arms around her, he felt the tension seep out from her shoulders and she leaned into him, her hard expression finally breaking and twisting, however briefly, into one of hurt and vulnerability. She choked back what might have been a sob and he felt something small and brittle break in his chest. She was a child, young and fierce and trying to carry the weight of a world on her shoulders.

As she let herself embrace him, he gave a sad half laugh, felt the first prick of tears. He pressed his lips together, his throat tightening.

“Okay…” he whispered.

He hugged her closer for a second and felt her grip on his arm squeeze in response. She pressed her cheek into his shoulder.

“Okay,” he whispered again, giving a single nod and stepping back, lips pressing together again. He blinked back the watery distortion at the edges of his vision.

She did not look up again as he gently put a hand on her shoulder. Already the lines of her face were hardening once more, that ghost of vulnerability slinking back to the cold shadows of the cold room, where she could pretend it did not exist.

Tommy released her, gave her one last look, and retreated to the door. The urge to look back overtook him as he reached for the handle, but he stared ahead, not daring to glance back, not daring to see again that anger and aloneness.

* * *

He lingered outside of Joel’s house, coming up the front steps past the huddle of flowers and cards and pausing with his hand on the porch railing. How many times had he had sat on that railing, arms crossed while Joel plucked at his six-string and they talked about nothing. The edges of his vision still swam a little, but he wiped a thumb beneath one eye, blinking and looking up. He rubbed at his face too, feeling a myriad of tiny muscles in his cheeks firing of their own accord, trembling across the surface of his skin.

It was so stupid. Some unacknowledged part of himself had grasped at the idea that coming here would provide some kind of revelation, like old movies where the living would have conversations with the ghosts of those gone and come out the other side knowing just what exactly they needed to do.

But no ghost materialized. No disembodied voice. There was only a dark porch that groaned under foot and a cold, lonely rocking chair.

Tommy turned, stuck his aching hands into his jacket pockets, and started for home.

The walk took him longer than normal. His footsteps were slow, dreading their destination and what he would do when they got there. As he passed along the quiet main street, the strings of twinkle lights illuminating the entrance of the old Copper Peak Inn and the bare table of RJ’s butcher shop, his thoughts turned to Jackson. Astrid looked out from the hardware store’s glass front and brushed back a strand of black hair, then lifted a hand towards him, her thin smile sympathetic but warm. He nodded back. Big-bellied Cedric with his battered cowboy hat stepped out from the tannery and locked the door behind him, hollering at Tommy from across the street to stop in if he needed anything, anything at all. Tommy nodded back again.

He walked on. The town felt warmer here, despite the piles of snow, with its ropes of yellow lights and brick and wood storefronts. It had always felt like a well-worn glove, a little tattered and frayed around the edges, but tailored to a perfect fit by years of use. Something of that was missing now, something Tommy could not quite put into words, like a tear down the center, the warmth now an illusion growing cold.

He had resolved himself to staying, to standing firm on the responsibility he had to Jackson, to his place here. But the image of his brother berating him for even considering pursuit now mixed with the memory of Ellie’s expression of anger and betrayal, with that resolute defiance that was less explosive than it was disappointed, unsurprised. That twisted in his gut almost more so than the grief. She would not relent, any more than Maria would. So why had he?

Tommy turned off the main street and began weaving between high snow piles caused by drifts and plows, the houses behind them lit by spare streetlamps. Somewhere, a porch door suddenly slammed and Tommy flinched. Joel hit the cold tiles again, his bloody knee sprayed out in pieces across the floor beneath him. The Asian kid in a stocking cap had Tommy’s right arm pinned. He had to punch with his left, but only once, then revolver handle, then stars, then nothing.

He had stopped in the middle of the road. Frozen in place. His hands still in his pockets, head down, eyes wide, heart hammering, breathing fast.

It had not been a flashback. Tommy had had those before, those vivid, visceral experiences of re-living a nightmare as if in the flesh. But the memory that had replayed in his mind had come on so suddenly and so uncontrollably that it had driven every other thought from his head, even the mindless movement of walking. It took him a moment to reorient himself, to return to the snowy street and the sturdy little houses on either side of him.

He forced his legs to move again, crunching forward through the frozen snow. The memory replayed again, but now Tommy could visualize it as if from afar, watching frame by frame. The Asian kid with the stocking hat, and another kid with black hair and a ballcap. A thin black woman with thick hair tied up. He ran through every face, every detail he could call up. Kids, every single one of them. He doubted any of them had even topped 35. Some part of him felt like that should make a difference to him, but it did not.

And the Washington Liberation Front? Had Joel ever even made it to the west coast? Not so far as Tommy knew. What were the WLF to him? They were ancient history to Tommy, but that at least was something. And yet, they had known him too. Known his name at least, as well as Joel’s. Known of two brothers named Tommy and Joel.

_Hey. I’m Tommy. That’s Jo—_

Tommy sucked in a breath. Oh no. Oh no no no. He felt himself stop again, closed his eyes this time, clenched his jaw, balled his hands into fists in his pockets. No. No. His mind raced, as if split down the middle, struggling to push the memory into obscurity, grasping for something, anything else to think of instead.

“Tommy?”

He had barely noticed that he had stopped in front of his own house. Maria was staring at him from the front porch, one hand lightly grasping the railing as if she had just stepped out, the other buried into the pocket of an overlarge plaid sweater that she wore over her nightclothes. The door was open behind her and a sliver of yellow light spilled out onto the dark street.

“Hey,” Tommy said quietly, mounting the steps to the front door. His fog of thoughts began to dissolve.

Absently, he paused to kiss Maria’s forehead, then pushed past her into the house. The wall of casserole dishes and Tupperware containers had been cleared from the kitchen counters, no doubt packed carefully into the refrigerator and the chest freezer in the garage. A single small lamp under the cabinets was still on, but otherwise the house was dark. Tommy heard Maria close the front door behind him.

“How is she?” she asked, coming into the kitchen.

“Angry.” He put his hands on the kitchen island and leaned forward, looking down. He felt haggard. Old, even.

“How angry?”

Tommy shot her a look that said everything she needed to know. Maria shook her head.

“Enough to go after them?” she said. “Tommy, we can’t let her do that. She should be here, with people who care about her.”

“I know.”

“What did she say exactly? Where did you leave it tonight?”

“I just…” Tommy trailed off, replaying the conversation in his head. He blinked at the wooden surface of the kitchen island. Ellie would not relent. Maria would not relent. And here he was, stuck between them like some unwilling ragdoll without a mind of his own. He had argued to both of them and failed. He had been knocked out cold and failed then too. It was all so very clear suddenly.

So he lied.

“She agreed to talk about it in the morning,” he said, not meeting Maria’s eyes.

She quieted, then nodded. “Good. That’s good.” Then, after a moment, she added, “I’m sorry, Tommy. I know that can’t have been easy.”

He shrugged one shoulder, still staring at the island countertop.

Maria came around the island, putting her hand over his. “You know you can talk to me…right?”

He looked up at her finally. He did know. For all that the care and worry had worn lines across her face, for all that the years of careful leadership and mediation had made her manner terse and direct, there was that part of Maria that only Tommy knew. The indulgent eyerolls at his corny jokes. The way she would shake her head and secretly smile when he had had a few drinks and attempted to serenade her on the guitar. The quiet conversations in bed about how maybe they weren’t meant to have kids. The way she would lean into his chest during the slow dances as if they were the only two people in the room. The way she held him whenever he awoke sweating or swearing or screaming.

He did know. And that made this worse.

“Yeah,” he murmured, voice scraping. He patted the back of her hand and straightened up from the island. “Later. It’s just…a lot.”

She nodded, not pushing. “I know. I love you. Don’t stay up too late, okay? You need to sleep too.”

They kissed and she was gone. Tommy listened to her upstairs for a long time. He knew the groan and creak of the old house. Knew when she was in the bathroom and brushing her teeth over the tin pail in the sink. Knew when she was kicking off her slippers beside the nightstand. Knew when she was crawling into bed. The right side of the bed, nearest the window, as always. Sometimes she stayed up reading or making notes on reports or proposals, but he doubted she would tonight.

Tommy never moved from the kitchen island. The creak of Maria tossing and turning in the bed above him had ceased for a good half hour before he moved again. Reaching behind him, he pulled up his jacket and drew the black pistol from his belt. It was the same pistol he had cleaned the night before, when the automatic movements had focused his mind amidst shock and grief. Now he set the gun on the countertop before him, the weight of it reassuringly familiar.

It had been his near constant companion for almost twenty years now. The pistol itself was nothing particularly remarkable. It was a .45, an enormously common model so reliable and so versatile that it had served as the standard-issue sidearm for every branch of the United States military since before the First World War through to the late Twentieth Century, and had continued in use well beyond that time in many units.

Tommy eyed the gun, ran a finger along its dull black barrel.

Then he rose. Walking gently so that the heels of his boots would not thump too loudly against the floorboards, he crossed the kitchen to the little desk where Maria would sit to jot down notes to herself or make a list of things to pick up from the Twin Sisters. He pulled a sheet of paper from the sheaf she kept stacked there and a pen from the _Jackson, Wyoming_ mug she kept writing instruments in.

When he returned to the island, he stared at the blank sheet for a long time. What could he say that would not sound hollow? That he was sorry? That he needed to do something? That he was doing this to keep Ellie from harm? That this was his fault and his to fix?

His eyes wandered to the pistol again.

It had once belonged to a man in Baltimore. Tommy had felt the crash of its barrel across the side of his face and the crunch beneath the butt of its handle as his kneecap was dislocated. He had knelt beside pews in a church on Christmas eve as this gun had been readied to shoot him and Joel in the back of the head.

In the end, this pistol had killed that man in Baltimore instead. And Tommy had pulled the trigger. Twice.

That was what he was capable of. In fact, he was damn good at it.

He leaned over the paper again and began to write.

_Maria,_

_I’m headed to Seattle…_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! As always, please leave a review and let me know what you think! For those who have not read Dirt, or who would like a refresher, Tommy's part in Chapter 25 (Unfettered) of that fanfic takes place directly after the THEN portion of this chapter. Parts of the THEN portions of this story will interweave with parts of Dirt, so I'll leave author's notes to let you know when that is the case. You can find Dirt by going to my profile page.
> 
> Also, huge shoutout to Mesker for agreeing to beta read The Weary Kind and for all the many talks about our man Tommy Miller!


	5. Chapter 4 - The Key

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a reminder, if you have not read Dirt or would like a refresher, Tommy's part in Chapter 25 (Unfettered) of that fanfic takes place some months before the THEN portion of this chapter. You can find Dirt by going to my profile page.
> 
> WARNING: This chapter contains depictions of torture.

Chapter 4 – The Key

** THEN **

_November 1, 2021_

Glass shattered inward as the butt of Tommy’s rifle struck the French patio door. Broken shards clattered to the ground, striking luxury hardwood floors and a thick Persian rug. He stepped through the opening, rifle couched against one shoulder, boots crunching on glass, as a flurry of snow swirled in behind him and floated into the corners of the sitting room within.

Bright, vaulted ceilings and plush sofas. An ornate fireplace and built-in bookshelves of rich mahogany. None of it dusty, none of it rotting. All polished, clean, and cared for. It would have felt like a scene from another world save for the scatter of broken patio door across the floor, the once elegant glass panels still flecked with blood and brain matter from the head of the guard in FEDRA blue slumped on the stone steps outside.

Tommy almost had not believed the initial intelligence reports about this place. Boston had been desperate and often brutal, but the inequities had not been quite so systemic, or at least not so obviously so. A luxurious mountain retreat seemed a stretch even for the military’s elite. But Boston was a backwater in comparison to Denver. In Denver, the military apparently lived like gods.

Rifle still held at the ready, Tommy’s eyes swept the sightlines, watching the doors and corners. Andrea and Joe followed him, quickly spreading to either side as they too stepped through the broken door. They moved as a single fluid unit, sweeping through the sitting room and into a vast open kitchen that the sitting room was situated off of. White cabinets and slate gray countertops encircled a center island larger than two dining tables put together.

In a doorway opposite them, a figure in blue suddenly appeared and Andrea shifted, two sharp reports ringing out from her assault rifle. Two cartridge casings and a figure in blue hit the tile floor. Beyond, the doorway led to what looked like a wide gallery with yet more lines of French doors that opened onto the outside patio.

Tommy lifted a hand and gestured Joe towards a second opening off the kitchen. The kid moved quickly, peering down the iron sights of an old-fashioned bolt action rifle and stepping into the opening to block any others from entering the kitchen. Tommy moved forward into the gallery, noting a spray of blood several feet from the soldier who had just been dispatched by Andrea.

As he peered around the corner into what looked like a second sitting room, this one with dark sofas and wood-paneled walls, a blur of blue uniform flew at him. Tommy had just enough time to glimpse a puffy red face and jowls bristling with a few days’ growth of beard before the soldier was on him. The barrel of a pistol glinted in the pale light cast into the gallery from the snowy outside. Tommy fired once, but the other man was too close and knocked the tip of the rifle aside, the bullet flying wide into the far wall. Tommy lashed out with the rifle itself, the butt of the weapon catching the soldier’s outstretched hand and the pistol it gripped. Wood smashed against metal and the pistol flew away.

Tommy bulled into the soldier, slamming the man into the wood paneling behind him and pinning him against the wall with the stock of his rifle. Tommy brought his knee up into the man’s groin. With a cry, the soldier tried to double over, but was held fast by Tommy’s rifle. He settled for curling in upon himself, his eyes suddenly wide and watering.

Tommy stepped back and allowed the soldier to slump to his knees, hands covering his groin. But in the next moment, Tommy brought the butt of the rifle down across the back of the man’s head. When the soldier grunted and fell forward, Tommy brought the butt down again. This time he was rewarded with the sharp high crunch of breaking bone, instantly hushed by the wet suck of soft tissue beneath. Uniquely cranial. Blood pooled over the hardwood floor, seeping into the fringe of the nearest Persian rug.

“Clear!” Tommy called out, his voice echoing up and down the gallery and back to the kitchen.

An answering “Clear!” echoed back to him from the next room.

“Tommy?” Eugene appeared in the doorway from the next room, moving slowly and cautiously and with the use of Tommy’s name to indicate he was a friendly.

Tommy relaxed, shifting his rifle to point at the ground. “Entry hall and living room are cleared?”

Eugene nodded. “Four actives dispatched. Jolene and the rest of Golf have the dining room and billiard room. Max and the rest of your crew just headed upstairs.”

“Any sign of Ransier?”

“None. Maybe we try the conservatory or the ballroom next? Dibs on the lead pipe when it comes to killing the bastard.”

“Ha ha,” Tommy said, rolling his eyes at the reference to the old boardgame. “He’s probably upstairs. C’mon.”

Eugene turned and looked back to the handful of Fireflies in the room behind him. “Cal, tell Jolene that her group is to secure the downstairs. The rest of us are goin’ up.” One of the Fireflies behind Eugene detached himself from the group and disappeared, then Eugene nodded at Tommy.

They found the staircase to the upstairs in the front entry hall, a wide, imposing thing all dark wood and white spiral banisters. A thick gold and brown runner muffled their footsteps as they ascended, rifles held up and pointed both forward and back to cover all possible angles of attack.

As Tommy’s boot hit the top step, a shot rang out, followed closely by a brief staccato of gunfire somewhere in the rooms away to his left. Glass shattered. Shouting and the thump of boots, then more shouting and the sounds of a struggle. A body hitting the floor. Briefly, there were more thumps of boots, then a brief, curt bark that was clearly Max. “Clear! We’re clear! Get him down, on the ground now!”

“Max!” Tommy called out, hitting the landing above the staircase and inching towards where the sounds were coming from, his rifle still at the ready.

“Here! We’re in here!”

A second later, Max’s head appeared from a doorway in front of Tommy. He was swathed in a heavy black coat and black stocking cap, his cheeks still red from the cold outside. One hand was bleeding from a laceration that sliced across the top of several knuckles, but he appeared otherwise unharmed. At the sight of Tommy, Max’s face split into a satisfied grin.

“We got him, boss,” he said, waving Tommy forward.

Tommy followed Max into what looked like the master bedroom. White walls and a patterned gold carpet. A rich mahogany bed and bureau and side table. A widescreen television hanging above a gas fireplace in an elaborate façade. Fireflies and blue-clad bodies littered the enormous room. One uniformed body slumped back across the bed, blood splattered across the green bedspread. Another was crumpled into a corner beside the bureau, a smear of blood having followed him down the white wall as he collapsed.

A third sprawled through the open doorway of a bathroom that opened off the far end of the bedroom. Shattered shards of bathroom mirror littered the ground around the body and chunks of white marble countertop had been blown away during the gunfight, disturbing the otherwise rich elegance of the bathroom.

No Fireflies appeared to have been killed in the exchange, though several nursed wounds like Max’s. One woman was perched on the edge of the bed, beside the dead soldier, her comrades wrapping a tourniquet around an arm that appeared to have caught a bullet.

As Tommy stepped into the room, his eyes were naturally drawn to the doorway into the open bathroom. The others in the room appeared to be looking towards it as well, and Tommy could hear the sounds of voices within. He and Eugene crossed the bedroom and peered in through the open door. A gray-haired man with a receding hairline lay face down on the marble tiles, his hands tied behind him, two Fireflies kneeling on either side. The blue field uniform he wore was unbuttoned and the flaps splayed out to the side, a white undershirt beneath. Tommy could hear the scrape of the shards of mirror beneath the man’s face.

Eugene grinned, elbowing Tommy.

Tommy returned to the expression. “Nice job, boys,” he said, finally letting out a sigh of relief as he nodded at the Fireflies in the bathroom and back at the others still in the bedroom. “Damn fine job. Let’s get ‘im downstairs. Tie ‘im up in the kitchen.”

Fifteen minutes later, the bodies had been cleared from the bedroom and the remaining Fireflies had moved downstairs, leaving Tommy and Eugene to survey the scene. Several gray accordion file folders sat atop the bureau, beside a thick black laptop and a silver tray with a crystal decanter and several whiskey tumblers. Amber brown liquid filled half the decanter.

Eugene poured out two tumblers of whiskey as Tommy began flipping through one of the file folders, scanning the pristine white pages and black ink. Somehow he had expected the papers to be yellowed or smudged or wrinkled. He could not recall the last time he had seen paper so clean and unblemished. But the whole house was clean and unblemished, if you did not count the bodies now strewn through it. It was a relic, an unreal reminder of things that were not supposed to exist anymore.

“Nothin’ here but commendations and promotional recommendations,” Tommy muttered, flipping the folder close.

Eugene offered a tumbler of whiskey to him. “No surprise there,” he said, downing a healthy swig of his own drink. “SOPs prohibit transport of hardcopy records Secret level and above outside QZ walls. Too much risk of shit falling into the wrong hands. But this, this is the holy grail.”

He had his hands on the laptop, a black, two-inch thick behemoth with hard metal sides and a handle so the thing could be carried like a briefcase. He flipped open the cover.

“Jesus, don’t see those much anymore,” Tommy said, throwing back his whiskey in a single mouthful and setting the tumbler back on the bureau.

“Naaah,” Eugene said, drawing out the word as he appeared to caress the beast of a machine. “Maybe not for civilians, but military started makin’ these babies right at the outset. They saw the writing on the wall. At least they did in Denver. Added level of security, right? Bein’ the only assholes with electricity. None of these babies even come with batteries, so they’re useless if you try and steal ‘em. You want a battery, you gotta check it out – approval level Colonel or above.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah. But there’s a fatal flaw to their evil plan,” Eugene said dramatically, grinning sideways.

“And what’s that?”

Eugene knocked back the last of his whiskey and practically crowed, “They trained a bastard like me to take apart these motherfuckers.”

Tommy rolled his eyes.

The screen flickered to life, a digital black backdrop with white text. An old-school appearance that Tommy suspected was anything but. Eyes suddenly shining, Eugene lifted the laptop from the bureau and hurriedly perched himself on the edge of the bed, narrowly missing the bloodstain from the dead soldier who had lain there only a short time previous. For a few minutes, his fingers tapped away with lightning speed, face aglow with concentration and something akin to the fervor of a hunter on the trail of wounded prey. Tommy frowned and looked away, abruptly feeling useless. He had not even owned a computer prior to the outbreak, having had everything he needed on his phone.

“Aha, now we’re talkin’,” Eugene said quietly, his tapping ceasing. At Tommy’s questioning glance, Eugene spun the laptop around to show a screen that, to Tommy’s eyes, looked very much like it had previously.

“Congratulations?” he ventured.

“You’re fuckin’ right,” Eugene replied, turning the laptop back again. “They’re still runnin’ SHA-2. Which means they’re almost certainly still using YubiKeys like they were when I was still a Fed. We get the key, we get access.”

“The key? Like a…password?”

Eugene paused, frowning as if considering how best to explain to a technological neophyte. “Uh…kinda. It’s a USB drive essentially, only it’s got an encryption key on it. Most FEDRA laptops were encrypted using SHA-2 and it looks like this one’s no exception. It’s an old encryption program the NSA developed. Standard protocol for FEDRA was to have a YubiKey to unencrypt. We find wherever Ransier’s hidden his key, we plug it in and get access.

Tommy lifted his brows. “I’ll pretend I know what all that means.”

Eugene chuckled, snapping the laptop closed. “The thing’s locked. The key will open it. Good enough?”

“Good enough. Let’s go get us a key then.”

* * *

Major General Edward Ransier was tied to a large dining room chair beside the kitchen island when Tommy and Eugene returned downstairs. The chair was a head-of-the-table style, all Edwardian elegance and curving lines. The FEDRA commander’s arms and legs had been tied to the armrests and chair legs and two polished leather belts circled his mid-section, holding him fast to the back of the chair.

He had aged well for his years, which Tommy guessed to be in the mid to upper fifties. Deep furrows lined a brow pushed high by a receding hairline, but the man had few of those fine hairline wrinkles of age, only the deep angular creases of a face long disposed to scowling. A day’s bristle had grown in across pouchy cheeks, but the trim gray mustache he wore was perfectly triangular. And if the manner in which his gray hair stood askew or his undershirt showed beneath the open flaps of his field uniform suggested he was at less than his finest, his demeanor nonetheless still radiated contempt and control.

“Has he said anythin’ yet?” Tommy asked quietly, leaning into Max to keep his voice low as they entered the cavernous kitchen.

Max likewise dropped his voice, turning his back to the general. “He’s asked after a couple members of his staff,” he said, nodding. “Nothin’ else.”

“Any still alive?”

“Two. Both with gunshot wounds. Del’s seein’ to ‘em both now.”

“Okay. Try to keep ‘em alive in case they could be useful.”

“Aye, boss,” Max said, nodding.

Foxtrot Squad was Tommy’s now, ever since Erik Griggs had been killed at the university, but Max was very much the squad’s second-in-command.

“Okay,” Tommy said, raising his voice. “Let’s get this place cleared out. Max, you and the rest of Foxtrot have the perimeter with Golf. Kilo will sweep the house for salvage and intelligence. Eugene and I have Ransier. Understood?”

Max and the other Fireflies assembled in the kitchen nodded their assent and began filing out the various doorways leading off the room. Eventually only Tommy and Eugene remained, along with the bound FEDRA commander. Eugene set the laptop on the kitchen island. Ransier eyed them warily but said nothing.

“Major General Edward Ransier, correct?” Eugene said.

The general did not answer.

“Well, if you’re not, I imagine you’ll be more willing to inform us of that shortly. So let’s go with yes, mmkay? Fuckin’ mouthful though, isn’t it? How about Ed? Eddie? I like Eddie. Do you like Eddie? Let’s stick with Eddie.”

The general was staring at Eugene as if he were a particularly unimpressive trained chimpanzee.

Eugene grinned, flashing that one gold tooth in the midst of his rowdy black beard. But if his tone was light and his expression joking and mocking, still there rippled beneath it all something more menacing. A danger and a malice that Eugene’s exterior façade could only mask so well.

“Okay then,” he said cheerfully. “Any questions before we begin?”

Ransier had been scowling up at Eugene from beneath gray brows, jaw tight. But his expression finally shifted and he tipped his head back, lips parting slightly. “Are you going to tell me why you’re here?”

His voice was deep and steady. A man accustomed to giving orders, accustomed to being obeyed. But the tone was more contemptuous than commanding now, and Tommy felt something within him start to stretch tight.

“You know, I’m _so glad_ you asked,” Eugene replied, utterly unphased. He pulled out one of the tall bar stools that lined one edge of the kitchen island and seated himself, flipping open the laptop and spinning it to face Ransier. “See, we need this unlocked, if you’ll just be a doll.”

Ransier’s expression did not change, but his eyes flicked to the laptop, then back to Eugene. “Are any of my men still alive?”

“That very much depends on you, Eddie dearest.”

“Does it now?”

“Mmhmm. Some of them _are_ alive, yes. Currently. Whether they remain that way is entirely up to you.”

Ransier could not prevent a sneer stealing across his face at that, just a slight twisting up of one corner of his gray mustache. He looked away, shaking his head as if dealing with amateurs.

Eugene’s smile lingered, but it faded to something more ominous. Then in one fluid motion, he rose from the bar stool, crossed the space between him and the bound man, and threw a fist into Ransier’s gut.

Breath blew out from the general’s lips and he doubled forward against his restraints, taken by surprise. Then Eugene threw another punch into Ransier’s gut, and another. Eugene had twenty years on Tommy at least, but for all that the man bragged about once having loved being fat, his arms were thick and ropey with muscle now.

Tommy watched dispassionately, arms crossed, leaning lightly against the kitchen island.

Some part of him quietly recognized that a past version of himself might have balked at beating a captive man. But he had been that man in the chair before, when it had been someone in a uniform just like Ransier’s doing the beating instead. Tommy had spent too many years on the open road or in the desperate confines of the military’s quarantine zones to have many qualms about a few punches, or much sympathy for an asshole in blue receiving them.

When Ransier was slumped forward and gasping, Eugene finally backed away, shaking his hand as if he had just received a particularly vicious papercut. He flexed his fingers, the head and scythe of his Lady Justice tattoo appearing and disappearing beneath the cuff of his coat.

“ _Okay_ ,” Eugene said, seating himself at the island again. He was breathing slightly heavily and dropped onto the bar stool with a sigh. “Eddie, my man, I owe you an apology. Clearly I gave you the wrong impression about how this conversation is going to go. Now—” His voice slipped from the falsely deferential to the sober serious. “Where is your encryption key?”

Ransier straightened gingerly, spittle flecking his lower lip. He was breathing in small, painful grunts, but his scowl deepened. He leaned gently back against the chair and his expression grew rigid and wooden. After a second, he stiffly muttered, “My name is Edward Jean Ransier. My rank is Major General.” He said nothing more.

Eugene gave a derisive bark of laughter. “And?”

“My name is Edward Jean Ransier. My rank is Major General.”

Uncrossing his arms, Tommy pushed off from the island. “We don’t give a damn about your name or rank, general, any more than we give a damn about your anti-interrogation techniques. Answer the question.”

The general twisted to look at Tommy, licking the spittle from his lip and letting his expression twist back to disdain. “My name is Edward Jean Ransier,” he said again. “My rank is Major General.”

Tommy snorted and shook his head. Eugene began rummaging in one of the drawers beneath the island.

“It’s a nice place you got here, general,” Tommy said matter-of-factly, slowly walking around the kitchen and coming closer to Ransier. “Somebody fixed it up real nice for you, didn’t they? Perks of the job, I guess. Leave the QZ behind for a coupla days, get out of the grind of that shithole and pretend everything’s just peachy out here. Bet your family enjoys it, don’t they?”

Ransier’s expression did not change, but his movements stilled. His eyes locked on Tommy and he muttered again, “My name is Edward Jean Ransier. My rank is Major General.”

“Now, they’re comin’ out to join you today, aren’t they?” Tommy continued, as if he had not heard Ransier. “Your wife and your daughter and your two boys, ain’t it? One platoon escort? Comin’ out around sundown, right? Yeah, that’s right. Gonna be _real relaxin’_.”

Ransier’s expression still did not change, but his cheeks were fading to the same color as his mustache. His breathing had almost imperceptibly quickened. “My name is Edward Jean Ransier. My rank is Major General.”

Tommy turned to stare straight at the general. “Sure would be a shame if we hadn’t wrapped up our business with you by then.”

A myriad of thoughts and emotions seemed to war behind Ransier’s eyes as he held Tommy’s gaze, his expression slowly drifting from disdain to suspicion, hatred, and finally, defiance.

“You’re bluffing,” he said, finally breaking his monotonous response.

“Ha!” Eugene gave a snort of laughter. He was still rummaging in the drawer beneath the island, not bothering to look up at Ransier. “Lynn Ransier, age 51. Tara Ransier, age 21. Michael Ransier, age 18. And Joshua Ransier, age 16. Escort commander is Lieutenant Jay Pellicciotti. Arriving approximately 1600 hours via armored convoy. That sound about right, Eddie?”

Ransier swallowed, but his jaw tightened. “Doesn’t fit very well with your little militia group’s high and mighty ideals, threatening women and children.”

Eugene’s head snapped up and his lips slowly parted, his expression indiscernible. It could have been angry or gloating or incredulous.

He withdrew from the drawer a long silver mallet with one side of the head flat and the other pocked by rows of pyramid-shaped points. A meat tenderizer. Tommy felt a twinge at the pit of his stomach.

“Is that…so?” Eugene said slowly, deliberately, carefully pronouncing each word. Whatever his expression had been a moment earlier, it was deadly now. The veneer of blithe ease had vanished, replaced by a darkness that Tommy had only rarely glimpsed in his friend but was always somehow aware of. It simmered beneath Eugene’s carefree, even reckless, exterior. It was in his eyes, in the sudden, sharp swerves that entered his tone without warning.

“ _Now_ all of a sudden, families are off limits?” Eugene continued, gently spinning the mallet in his hand as if gauging the weight of it. He stepped in front of Ransier. “You think we won’t play by your rules?”

The meat tenderizer crashed into Ransier’s knee.

It was the mallet face with the pyramid-shaped points that shattered the general’s kneecap, crunching the bone like cracking walnuts. Ransier cried out in horror before the mallet even struck, then lurched forward as the tenderizer fell, bucking against the belts securing him to the chair. His cry gave way to a long bellow of pain as he thrashed against his bindings, knuckles white, face red, the veins in his neck and brow bulging to an ugly purple.

Tommy winced and looked away. The sudden ferocity of Eugene’s attack had taken him by surprise, but it was not the crunch of bone or the general’s scream that made Tommy’s stomach churn. Eugene swung the mallet again, this time at the general’s shin. It landed with a meaty smack and a sharp, high snap. Tommy forced himself to look back, but he could not quite keep an uncomfortable scowl from pulling at his lips as Ransier cried out a second time.

For Ransier personally, Tommy felt very little. The general was a blue uniform. He had information they needed. He was alive only because they did not yet have that information, and neither he nor they could be under any illusion about the fact that Ransier was not going to end well here. That pragmatic part of Tommy barely blinked as Eugene swung the meat tenderizer a third time.

But the chill that curled at the pit of his stomach came from a memory. Not even a memory from the world before, when violence had meant at most a fist fight behind a bar over a girl. Instead, it was a memory of a dirty apartment, deep in the Boston quarantine zone, late at night. A man with shattered fingers and tears streaking down his gaunt, dirty face. Tommy holding one of those broken hands pinned to a table before the man.

_That’s fuckin’ torture, Joel._

Even then, enough of…something…some part of him, had remained to cause him to recoil in horror. It had been only a few years ago. Was that part of him now gone entirely?

The scowl on Tommy’s face deepened, but he did not move.

Eugene was breathing hard by the time he backed away from Ransier. He pointed the mallet of the meat tenderizer at the bound man and Tommy noted the flecks of blood now clinging to the pyramid-shaped points.

“You fucking hypocrite,” Eugene sneered, his voice heaving with more than just exertion. “You send your goons after the families of anyone who dares step out of line, and you expect your own family to be untouchable? How about we see how _your_ wife likes gettin’ cornered by three fuckers with masks on?”

He rammed the head of the mallet into Ransier’s stomach, using it like a fist rather than swinging it like a hammer.

“See how _she_ likes payin’ for _your_ sins?”

He punched with the mallet again and this time there was a snap like breaking or cracking bone, likely a rib or two. Ransier started to gasp and abruptly stopped, his face contorting as breathing suddenly became painful.

Eugene’s eyes were flashing as he leaned forward and used both hands to start ramming the mallet into the general’s gut again, and again, repeatedly, faster and faster, anger and fury and rage boiling up from somewhere far more personal than a basic interrogation called for. “We’ll burn this place to the ground, Eddie. We’ll slit the throats of every soldier left alive in front of you, one by one. We’ll break every bone in your fuckin’ body. Every bone in your wife’s body. Every bone in your kids’ bodies. We’ll cross every fuckin’ line you have because there’s nothing, _nothing_ you goddamn fuckers don’t deserve.”

“Eugene!”

Tommy was reaching for Eugene before he had even made a conscious decision to move. At first Eugene resisted, lurching forward as Tommy wrapped arms around him from behind, angrily trying to throw off Tommy’s grip.

“Eugene!” Tommy hollered again, dropping his weight into his hips. They were fairly evenly matched and although Tommy managed to pull his friend off Ransier, Eugene still strained forward just a step away from the bloody form of the slumped commander. When the muscles in Eugene’s shoulders and arms finally gave way and he slowed fighting Tommy’s grasp, Tommy could feel a deep tremble rippling through his friend’s body and heard Eugene’s breath coming in shaking stutters.

“We need him alive, remember?” Tommy hissed in Eugene’s ear, now pulling him back towards the kitchen island and the open laptop. “Jesus Christ, man. Eugene? _Eugene?_ What the hell’s wrong with you?”

The other Firefly looked almost taken aback, his expression clearing from rage to dawning realization, though not quite regret. He let himself be steered back to one of the stools beneath the kitchen island counter, then nodded automatically as he lowered himself to sit.

“I’m fine,” he muttered. His voice shook.

Tommy peered down at him, lips parted.

“I’m fine,” Eugene said again. He was staring at a point on the far wall.

Behind them, Ransier wheezed.

“You people,” the general rasped, breath coming in clipped and painful gasps. “You have…no…control.”

Tommy clenched his jaw, feeling Eugene tense once again. “Shut up,” he said, turning his head slightly, not quite looking back at Ransier.

Ransier did not listen. “No…org…organization. You expect…us to take you…seriously. I’ve…seen…more discipline in…children.”

Now Tommy did turn to face Ransier, straightening and keeping a hand on Eugene’s shoulder to stop his friend from rising to the bait. “Shut the fuck up,” Tommy repeated.

“Or…what?” Ransier said, suddenly coughing. It was a wet, hacking cough. “You’ll kill me? Be…my guest.”

Eugene lurched on the stool and Tommy had to brace himself to keep Eugene seated, but he could see the other Firefly’s brows and mouth bending in anger once again.

“Let me handle this,” Tommy murmured back to Eugene, gritting his teeth.

They stared at each other. His friend strung tight as a bow, ready to snap. Tommy grim and controlled, trying to convey some semblance of calm.

Ransier broke the brief silence first.

“You think…I don’t know who you are?” His voice was rasping still and growing guttural. He was looking past Tommy, to where Eugene was seated. “Eugene?...Linden, right?...Corporal…Eugene Linden?...You were…court marshalled. Three years ago.”

“In absentia,” Eugene growled.

“For desertion and…murder…Three…counts.” Ransier coughed again, and this time the wet smack at the back of his throat brought up blood. He spat, but red spittle flecked his chin and mustache.

“Stop talkin’,” Tommy snapped, feeling his first stab of anger. Ransier was redirecting the conversation, hijacking the interrogation, proving his own point about the Fireflies’ lack of control.

“Three soldiers,” the general continued, unfazed by either Tommy’s warning or his own labored breathing. “Good men…And you…shot them…like dogs. Your own…men. You people…you think…you’re…saving the world. You’re just…anarchists and…and animals.””

Eugene burst up from the stool again. Tommy planted both hands on the other Firefly’s chest, keeping himself between Eugene and Ransier.

“You want to talk animals, you piece of shit—” Eugene started, fury once again lacing his voice.

“Eugene!”

“There’s no such thing as good men in FEDRA. You’re all looters and rapists and murderers—”

“Eugene, stop!”

Ransier spat. “You fucking amateurs. You deserve—”

Tommy released Eugene, spun, and drove a fist straight into the center of Ransier’s face. Bone and cartilage crunched beneath his knuckles. It was a brief, vicious blow, struck with the instinctive efficiency that had been born of so many years on the open road. Inflict the greatest amount of pain, ensure the greatest disability, within as short a time as possible. The nose was broken, without a doubt. The bridge stuck out at an odd angle, and blood abruptly began running into Ransier’s gray mustache.

He howled.

Eugene looked momentarily stunned, but Tommy rounded on him, feeling the flush creeping up his neck and behind his ears. “Sit down, Eugene!” he growled, unable to keep the anger from his voice now. “ _For fuck’s sake._ He’s tryin’ to rile you up. And so far, he’s doin’ a damn good job. Christ, he wants you to kill him quick. Access to the laptop dies with him and then there’s no reason to stick around when his family gets here. Jesus, Eugene!”

Eugene’s eyes flashed for a moment, but the rage faltered and a second later he swallowed, slowly dropping back to the stool he had been seated on.

“ _Let me handle it_ ,” Tommy repeated.

The rush of anger brought the familiar cold clarity as well. For men like Eugene, rage was wild and uncontrolled. But for men like Tommy, it swept all the noise and distractions aside. It focused his mind on simple means and ends.

The knot in Tommy’s stomach had untwisted itself. He turned back to the bound man.

Ransier had thrust his head back, mouth open, the universal response to a heavily bleeding nose. Blood had already soaked through his mustache, across his lips, and down his chin. It was dripping onto the white undershirt he wore beneath his unbuttoned field uniform shirt.

“You goddamn—” the general started to snarl, but Tommy deftly reached out, grabbed the misshapen bridge of Ransier’s nose, and yanked it roughly in one direction.

“Ahh! Sto—Ahhhh! _AHHHH!_ ”

Ransier screamed as Tommy felt the broken cartilage shifting beneath his fingers, felt the warm slick of Ransier’s blood smear across the bottom of his palm. Ransier bucked and strained against the belts holding him to the chair and his fingers spread wide, then curled, as if he would be gently cradling his abused face if his hands were not bound to the armrests.

When the general’s cries had abated to stuttering, moaning huffs, Tommy leaned down so that his face was level with Ransier’s, hands on his knees. He kept his expression cold.

“Let’s try again, general,” Tommy said quietly. “Payin’ attention now?”

Tears had welled beneath Ransier’s bloodshot eyes and left wet trails down his cheeks. He looked up at Tommy, licked blood from his lips, and nodded.

Tommy returned the nod and muttered, “Good.”

Then he reached out, took hold of the pointer finger on Ransier’s right hand, and wrenched it backwards at an impossible angle.

It snapped.

Ligament and bone came loose under Tommy’s grip, but he did not give himself time to recoil at the thought of what he was doing. He grabbed Ransier’s bloody chin as the general started to cry out and forced Ransier to stare straight at him.

“Because we’re not gonna kill you,” Tommy said, ignoring Ransier’s moan of pain through clenched teeth. “At least, not until you give us what we need. If that takes another 30 seconds, great. If it takes ‘til your family gets here, then I guess you’re gonna have to watch some hard things first. That clear?”

Ransier’s breath still came in ragged, labored gasps. He weakly tried to spit blood again, but it only trailed down his chin, flecks of it landing on Tommy’s thumb. The general’s eyes drooped with exhaustion, but he met Tommy’s gaze. He swallowed and faintly nodded.

Nausea mixed with hatred in Tommy’s stomach and for a second, he could not tell if he hated himself or the man before him more. But that stab of hate flashed to anger in an instant and he felt his whole body grow hot.

He released Ransier’s chin, grabbed the man’s middle finger, and wrenched that back too. It snapped with the same pop of rending bone and ligament.

“I said, is that clear!”

“ _Yes! Jesus fucking Chr—yes, yes!_ ”

Ransier bellowed and panted, blood frothing his lower lip, staring in horror out of the corner of his eye at the two fingers on his right hand bent back at impossible angles.

_This is fuckin’ wrong, Joel._

Tommy ground his teeth together, jaw tight, pushing back at the memory the pressed in on him again, a vision of that squalid Boston apartment. Broken hands. Shattered fingers dragged across a tabletop. A bloody notebook page pinned to a dead man’s chest. _RAT_ in wet, red letters.

“Okay then,” Tommy breathed, pressing his lips into a thin line as he caught Ransier’s chin again and jerked the general’s head up to look straight into the man’s watery eyes.

“Now, where is the encryption key?”

* * *

** NOW **

_Seattle, Day 1._

Blood had dried on the white walls and gray tiles of the stairwell. It was a brownish stain, a smear so faded and covered in the accumulated grime of years of neglect that it would barely have been noticeable against a darker wall, even under the pale beam of Tommy’s flashlight. Chunks of cement had been blown out from the wall as well, bullet holes that pockmarked the stairwell in a pattern so familiar as to be almost ignoble.

There was no body. Only the smear on the wall and a series of smaller smears trailing down the stairs up which Tommy had come. It told a story that Tommy would never know, that perhaps there was no one left to tell. Infected or FEDRA or WLF or just some random nobody trying to survive. Who had been the victim? Who had been the shooter?

Abandoned homes with their fading family photos and storefronts proclaiming _2 for 1_ sales left their own story of a time long lost, but the outbreak was approaching three decades in the past now and the layers of human history had not ceased to pile on since then. Everywhere, the walls and stairwells of the world were just as marred by the signs of the people who had come, and gone, in the years since.

Tommy swept his flashlight away from the stain and up the next set of stairs, keeping the light beside the pistol he held out at the ready as well. His boots scraped only slightly across the cement, but the sound echoed jarringly in the enclosed space, far louder than he would have preferred. He listened, ears straining for any other sound that would indicate life. Voices. The moan of Runners. The ragged slow breaths of a dormant Clicker. He had heard the scurry of some small animal on one of the levels below, where a stairwell door had been left ajar on a dark corridor. But otherwise, nothing.

The main gate had been abandoned too. He had watched it for hours, hitching his horse a quarter mile away and slowly making his way forward on foot. That had been the night previous, and neither the setting sun nor the dark of night had revealed any human activity. The dawn had come bright and crisp and still no sound, no movement. The gate was closed, but it was not guarded.

And now this. The lettering across the front of the building had read Salish Medical Center. It had been the tallest building in sight, situated atop the high point of a hill up from the small, rusting door in the wall that Tommy had forced his way through several blocks from the main gate. He was inside the quarantine zone, at a natural lookout point, with every indication that not a soul occupied the place.

Sighing, he continued up the stairwell, still moving slowly, keeping his breath low and steady and quiet. His left knee clicked with every other step as he climbed.

The stairwell ended at Floor 14 and a rusting green door. Before it, a shallow puddle and a yellow stain that cut across half the ceiling tiles suggested a leak in the roof of the building. Tommy put his ear to the door and held his breath, listening. Nothing.

Pressing his lips together, he gently turned the handle of the door and pulled it open by inches. The anticipated groan of corroded metal and the grind of rust made him grimace, but still he heard no movement in the darkness beyond.

He shone his flashlight through the opening. A long corridor with clinical white walls and tile floors. Several gurneys lined the sides of the hallway and, at the far end, were stacked across it as if to create a barrier. Still no movement or sound.

Tommy pushed through the narrow gap in the stairwell doorway and into the hallway. Dawn was filtering across the tiles through the glass windows of doors leading off the corridor, but the light had that dim, strained quality typical of windows that had decades of accumulated dust and mildew. Water had seeped through here too, gathering in shining pools and leaving mottled stains across the ceiling and floor. In places, the ceiling itself had come down in great chunks, trailing strips of spongy white ceiling tiles and insulation. Tommy avoided these, feeling the floor grow soft and soggy near them.

Through the doors that opened off either side of the hallway, he could see beds and curtains, some overturned on their sides, some thrashed and ripped and stained brown, others almost completely untouched. Skeletons lay on two or three of the beds, strapped down, grinning macabrely atop mattresses black and rotting from the soak of decaying flesh.

Stepping into one of the rooms, Tommy swept the corners with his flashlight first, then sighed and flicked it off, shoving his pistol into his back waistband.

“Where the hell are you?” he muttered to himself, shaking his head.

The place was abandoned. Just as the gate had been abandoned. No one even pretending to control this area would have left a high point like this unoccupied. Had the entire zone been abandoned? The military was long gone. That at least was clear, but then also hardly surprisingly. But there had been rumors, years ago, that the Washington Liberation Front had gained the upper hand in Seattle, or was near to doing so. Had they succeeded? Had they failed? Where had they gone?

Perhaps they had dwindled to nothingness like the Fireflies. Perhaps the fading patches on the shoulders of jackets was the only evidence that they had once existed, just as the rusting metal dog tags of Fireflies were now relics of a cause long dead.

Not for the first time in the weeks since he had left Jackson, Tommy ground his teeth at how blind he felt. He had kept tabs on the Fireflies, not on other groups. That seemed a gross oversight now.

He set his pack down on the edge of a bed and drew out a folded sheet of paper from one of the outer pockets. It was frayed and delicate, brittle from years of exposure and browned by repeated water damage. He unfolded it, spreading it out on the bed.

It showed a FEDRA soldier in riot gear pointing a gun at civilians bound and kneeling. Bold letters across the top proclaimed _THEY THINK WE’RE SHEEP!_ And above the soldier, the shadow of a massive black wolf loomed, eyes and snarling teeth white and sharp and menacing beside a call to arms. _BARE YOUR FANGS._

Tommy shook his head, a corner of his lip turning up. What a load of crock. Cartoonish wolves and cute catchphrases designed to rile up the masses. Designed to convince them that the terrible deeds they did had some meaning, that their deaths had some purpose.

 _Look for the Light. Believe._ He ground his teeth again. The WLF certainly had not had a monopoly on cute catchphrases and naïve recruits.

“Where the _fuck_ did you go?” he said aloud again, feeling his neck grow hot with frustration.

He had the found the poster outside Yakima, in the cab of an abandoned farm truck. It made sense that even if the WLF’s influence had once reached as far as Washington’s agricultural breadbasket, that it might have since had to consolidate its span of control. Years had passed. Times changed. But they should be here. Here at least, in the heart of the city where the rebel group had originated.

Where _were_ they?

The thought of returning to Jackson, to Maria, empty-handed and with nothing to show after months of absence left his stomach twisting with anger and apprehension. He left his backpack on the bed and slung his rifle back over a shoulder, coming near one of the grimy windows that let light into the room. The glass was fogged with decades of mildew and dried debris, but Tommy could see the city’s downtown in the distance. It looked familiar. Not the skyline itself, but the march of silent, square monoliths of a forgotten age, some bare shells of iron and broken glass, some hardly touched at all.

He unslung his rifle and couched it against his shoulder, adjusting the scope to bring the distant cityscape into focus. The morning light was still rising behind him and it painted the downtown buildings in a mellow orange glow, dully glinting off windows and gray cement. Beyond, a choppy gray expanse of water that must be the Puget Sound.

Nothing. No movement. No lights. No sign of life anywhere. He tried to tell himself that anything would be difficult to see at this distance, even with the aid of the scope, but he felt his heart sinking anyhow. Boston had been the last major occupied zone that he had seen and the presence of a military force there had been obvious, even from afar. Either the WLF did not control Seattle with the same security that FEDRA had controlled Boston or…the WLF was not here.

He gave an angry snort and started to drop the rifle, then stopped. He lifted his head from the scope, eyes narrowing, then put his eye to it again, re-focusing it.

There.

A fading, fluttering banner had caught his eye. Not in the downtown area, but before it, closer to the medical center where Tommy now stood. The banner was stained by years of exposure, but it was a brownish white smear against a red brick building, highlighted by the direct light of the rising sun. It looked small from here, but the building itself had to be at least seven or eight stories tall and the banner spanned at least half that height. An ornamental top level gave the building a distinctly old-fashioned appearance, as did its broad L-shaped layout and brick exterior.

The banner showed a wolf’s head. Snarling. Fangs bared.

Tommy felt his chest tighten with anticipation. “Alright then,” he muttered, grimly smiling to himself. “That’s a start.”

He shifted the rifle, sweeping the scope over the building and pausing when it hovered over an old-fashioned sign proclaiming the name of the building. Block letters, up high on stilts and struts.

_SEREVENA HOTEL._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading and please leave a review if you enjoyed! I'm sorry it's been some months since my last update. Between a new puppy and various work and personal situational changes, my life got interrupted a fair bit over the last few months. Good news is that things are well settled again and I should be back to being able to update every two to three weeks. Thank you for your patience!


	6. Chapter 5 - Serevena

Chapter 5 – Serevena

** THEN **

_November 1, 2021_

Snow fell. Slowly. Lightly. Like flecks of dust. Or spores.

It was only just starting, the first herald of heavier snow to come, the clouds gray and thick but still too high to forebode a real storm. Tommy could see the distant town in the valley below, as gray as the clouds above and as blanketed in snow as the hills surrounding it. It would almost have blended into the landscape, save for the sharp angles of roofs and the black sockets of empty windows. A ski resort, Eugene had said. Once a retreat for Denver’s elite. Still a retreat for Denver’s elite really, if of a different ilk now.

Ransier was dead.

Fireflies buzzed around Tommy, coming in and out of the luxury mansion, carrying boxes of files and crates of ammunition, canned vegetables and salted meat and sacks of potatoes. Someone had brought up a couple cases of whiskey and wine from the mansion’s cellar and stacked them on the snow-covered patio table beside Tommy. Several M4s lifted off dead guards had been set atop the cases, tiny snowflakes melting against the cold metal barrels as soon as they touched the guns.

Tommy hunched forward, elbows on his knees, perched on the edge of an ornate metal patio chair. He was cutting away the red wax seal from one of the bottles of whiskey, unhurriedly working the edge of a pocketknife around the mouth of the bottle, cutting into the wax with slower deliberation than he needed to. His eyes felt heavy, his lips chapped by the cold. The humdrum of activity in and around the ski lodge behind him was like a dull whine of background noise, ignoble, unimportant.

He paused. His unfocused gaze had sharpened, locking on his thumb as it gripped the handle of the knife he was using. Blood had dried around the edges of the cuticle, forming a brownish red half-moon. A streak of blood not quite wiped away clung to the skin on the inside of the finger. He turned the knife over, looking at the rest of his hand. More half-moons. More dried streaks.

He clenched a fist around the knife as he felt the fingers start to tremble.

From behind him, he heard the scrape of another patio chair and straightened.

Eugene pulled up the second chair beside Tommy and sank into it, oblivious to the layer of snow still covering its seat. Tommy glanced sidelong at his friend, catching the gray pallor in Eugene’s cheeks and the faraway look in his eyes. He too was staring towards the abandoned ski resort in the valley below.

“Well?” Tommy said, pocketing his knife and using his fingers to peel away what was left of the red wax seal.

Eugene nodded slowly. His voice was not quite mechanical, but it felt hollow, automatic. “It’s good. There’s a lot to go through, but the key opened up the whole computer. Maps, locations, troop numbers, informers.”

“Outposts?”

“Yeah. Everything from Nebraska to Idaho. Oil, coal, beef, potatoes. Should be able to figure out which outposts have the least secure supply routes. Hit ‘em there.”

“Marlene’ll be happy, at least,” Tommy murmured.

He pried out the cork from the whiskey and took a swig straight from the bottle, letting the burning liquid roll around his mouth for a second before swallowing. This was good stuff, not the stinging disinfectant distilled in the bathtubs of Denver cellars. He passed the bottle across to Eugene, who likewise tipped it back for a long pull.

So they had gotten what they had come for. Accomplished exactly what they had intended. The body of Denver’s second highest ranking military commander slumped bloody and bound within the luxury lodge behind them and the Top Secret intel they had sought in the ambush was now literally at their fingertips for the taking. They would be pouring over the information on Ransier’s laptop for weeks, months. The blow that this attack would deal to the Denver FEDRA was difficult to understate, not to mention the boost it would give to Firefly morale both in Denver and across the west. Marlene would be more than happy. She would be ecstatic. She would crow the news across every Firefly radio broadcast, use it as evidence of the strength of the Fireflies and the corruption of the military. _When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light. Believe in the Fireflies._

Tommy took the bottle of whiskey back before his hand could start to shake again.

They sat unmoving for a time, letting the silence yawn away before them as the flecks of snow slowly fell across the patio. Tommy listened to the sound of his own trembling breath, watched the cold condense each exhalation into a puff of fog before him.

Finally, Eugene stirred.

“I’m…sorry about in there,” he murmured, not looking at Tommy.

Tommy ran a thumb across the label on the whiskey bottle, not needing to glance sidelong at his friend this time.

Eugene continued. “I know I…kind’ve lost it, for a while.”

“It was personal,” Tommy said, more statement than question.

Eugene nodded, absently twisting at a black watch he wore around one wrist. “Yeah. It was. But shit, I knew that goin’ in. Should’ve been ready for that. You did good steppin’ in when you did.”

Tommy allowed himself a sardonic smile. “Yeah, I did real good,” he muttered, more to himself than Eugene. He took another swig of whiskey, then set the bottle down on the patio between them. As the amber liquid pleasantly burned from the back of his throat to the pit of his stomach, he glanced at his friend again. Eugene had the same faraway look in his eyes, both his usual mirth and that simmering sense of menace now gone.

It had been Ransier’s mention of family that had set Eugene off. A rage abruptly brought on by the audacity of the FEDRA commander to suggest that the families of combatants were somehow off limits in this brutal struggle for power and control. And that kind of rage only came from one place.

“What’d they do to your family?” Tommy asked quietly.

Eugene looked away, the movement almost a flinch. He leaned forward, pressing the back of his knuckles against his lips.

A part of Tommy felt he should leave it, knew he should. He had seen the same sort of reticence in Joel, whenever someone had asked about their lives before the outbreak. The same silence. You did not talk about your dead. But Eugene’s silence was somehow different. Less defensive. More introspective.

“You said you had a wife and daughter in Denver still?” Tommy tried again.

Eugene’s jaws tightened and he pressed his hand more firmly to his lips. But after a second, he drew a long breath and the tension in his shoulders and face abruptly loosened, drooping his whole body. He closed his eyes.

“They didn’t kill her.”

He had moved his clenched fist away from his mouth to speak, but he pressed it now against the bridge of his nose, eyes still closed.

“My wife,” he continued. “Claire. They made sure she lived through it. Better…message that way.” His face twisted. Scornful. Hateful. Snowflakes had caught in his beard and hair and he looked older, more brittle.

Tommy did not need to ask who “they” were or what Eugene’s wife had lived through. His friend’s threat to Ransier’s wife had been very specific. Cornered by three men in masks. It did not take a great leap to connect the dots.

Tommy was silent a moment, watching the lazy snowflakes drift down around them, then he looked back to Eugene. “What kind of message?”

Eugene’s expression darkened and he opened his eyes finally, shaking his head as he dropped the hand that had been pressing against his brow. “To fuck off,” he said sharply. “To stop raisin’ hell. Stop reporting excessive use of force incidents, illegal requisition of rations…rape. It’s the only way the bastards like Ransier can run things anymore. No paychecks or patriotic pride to keep your grunts in line. You want loyalty from the assholes you give guns to, you let ‘em get their rocks off doin’ what they want, so long as they do it quietly. And you fuck up the assholes who try to discipline abuses.”

Bitterness laced every word spat from Eugene’s lips and Tommy could feel again that simmering rage that the other Firefly masked with reckless indifference and wisecracks. But as Eugene shook his head and snatched up the whiskey bottle again, it was more than anger that pinched his face. Regret? No. Shame. A thousand Ransiers could die horrific deaths and it would not fill that plunging void for Eugene.

“And that’s why you don’t go home,” Tommy murmured.

Eugene dropped his gaze to the ground and said nothing.

One of the patio doors behind them rattled and opened and Tommy straightened to see Max stepping out onto the patio, tracking fresh footprints in the snow covering the bricks. Four others stepped out after him, two Fireflies bearing rifles and grim expressions and two FEDRA soldiers in blue.

The two soldiers both wore bandages. One, a young woman with black hair and a long, angular face, cradled her left hand in a sling, the tips of only two fingers protruding from the swath of bandages. The other was a man likely in his early forties, with a broad face and deep-set eyes, silver creeping into dust-colored hair. He leaned against the woman, one blue pants leg cut away to the knee, revealing a mess of bandages already starting to bleed through somewhere around the man’s exposed calf. With support from his comrade, the man hopped on his one good leg. Dried blood still smeared the fronts of both of their uniforms.

“Tommy, Eugene,” Max grunted as he approached them, motioning for both to remain seated. “We should be ready to go in another 10 minutes or so. The trucks are almost loaded. We’ll be well gone from here by the time the general’s family arrives, and below the snowline before they can track us.”

“Good,” Tommy replied curtly, gathering himself and beginning to focus back on the task at hand. “You got the pictures?”

Max nodded. They had had orders to take photos of the stormed mansion, and of Ransier, if the attack was successful. FEDRA would almost certainly attempt to cover up a blow of this magnitude and Marlene had no plans to lose the ability to use this victory as propaganda.

“We’ll be in in a sec,” Tommy said with approval. “Don’t forget these.” He gestured towards the crates of alcohol and the assault rifles perched atop them.

Max nodded, then turned and hooked a thumb back towards the two soldiers behind him. “What are we doin’ with these two?”

Eugene glanced behind them and lifted a brow. “They’re the only survivors?” When Max nodded again, Eugene swung to look at Tommy, his expression a grim question.

Tommy twisted to look back at the two Feds. He instantly wished he had not, but he kept his face composed, looking them both over. The man looked in more pain, but the pain mixed with fear and uncertainty, his nostrils flaring and eyes darting around the patio. By contrast, the woman’s expression contained all the arrogant defiance of youth. Her chin jutted out and she held herself proud and erect, despite having almost certainly lost half of her left hand. She had a sergeant’s chevrons on one sleeve.

Turning away, Tommy caught Eugene’s grim look for a second, then dropped his gaze. They both knew the answer. This attack was akin to setting off a bomb in a fireworks factory. Any Fireflies in Denver would have to go to ground for months. Anyone even remotely associated with them faced possible exposure and execution. Hell, the military might not even need the excuse of an official connection to the Fireflies to exact revenge. Retributions would be swift and brutal and very public.

They could not afford witnesses.

Tommy pressed his lips together and glanced back up at Max. Eugene was the more senior Squad Leader, but Tommy was Max’s direct commander. “We’re not takin’ prisoners, Max,” he said quietly.

Max drew a long, slow breath. Then he nodded, just once. “All right.”

The older Firefly’s boots creaked in the fresh snow as he turned back towards the lodge, abruptly barking an order. “Get ‘em over there. On their knees.”

“What?” A man’s voice.

Tommy turned.

The soldier with his leg swathed in bandages was staring wide-eyed at Max, mouth open in disbelief. His eyes flicked to Tommy and Eugene and he violently shook his head.

“What the hell did you patch us up for then? You sick, twisted—”

The woman with her arm in a sling cut in. “We have Firefly prisoners,” she said, speaking fast and terse, all business. “Exchange us. Tell them who we are. Sergeant Lilian Reeh and Private Jeffrey—”

“I don’t care about your names,” Tommy said sharply, standing and feeling a flush of anger race up his neck. “And your bosses don’t exchange prisoners, sergeant. We’re not enemy combatants, accordin’ to FEDRA command. We’re just criminals. Our people in your custody were dead as soon as we fired our first shot here. _Max_.”

Max came forward, scowling, and grabbed the sergeant by her arm as the other two Fireflies took either side of the man to support him on his one good leg. Both soldiers were steered towards a small snowbank a few feet away, where the snow had piled against a knee-high brick wall that circled the patio. The man cried out as he was forced to his knees, his face contorting in pain as he lurched forward, his injured leg collapsing under him and forcing him to fall face-first into the snowbank. Max similarly kicked the back of the woman’s leg, driving her to her knees with a grimace. She remained upright and proud, but Tommy could see her shoulders start to shake.

“Please, wait,” the man sputtered, half turning to look back up at his captors as he struggled to push himself up from the snow again. “Please, I have fam—”

_POW._

Max had drawn a pistol from his coat pocket and fired it at the prone man before the soldier could even finish his sentence. The body jerked and collapsed back into the snow, blood gouting out from the side of the man’s head as limbs went slack.

Sergeant Reeh flinched and her shaking intensified, but she stared resolutely ahead, jaw tight.

It was so easy to take life. Maybe it was harder to pull the trigger when you knew their names or had studied their faces or seen pictures of their kids. But once you could bring yourself to do it, the actual act of killing another human being was ridiculously easy. And when the gun discharged, and muscle and bone were split and shattered, and life leeched out through gaping holes that did not belong in the human body, there was nothing remotely dignified or noble in the act of dying either.

Max stepped up behind Reeh, put the barrel of the pistol to the back of her head, and pulled the trigger.

_POW._

Some small, absurd part of Tommy’s brain gazed at the two bodies, faces plunged into the snowbank, as if they were making sad, bloody snow angels. Blood had even sprayed out into the snow around Lilian Reeh’s head like some macabre halo.

“Don’t ever let the fuckers make you feel bad for ‘em,” Eugene abruptly growled beside him, staring at the dead soldiers. The thread of menace had returned to his voice. “They got what they deserved.”

What they deserved.

Tommy let his eyes slide away from the bodies and shrugged his coat around his shoulders, brushing snowflakes from the sleeves. As he did so, he caught sight of his hands again.

The whiskey had been enough to stop the tremor, but dried blood still clung in half-moons around the edges of his fingers. He clenched his jaw, drew out a pair of winter gloves from his coat, and pulled them on.

“Come on,” he grunted, voice grating as he gestured at the crates atop the patio table. “Let’s get the rest of this shit packed up and hit the road.”

* * *

** NOW **

_Seattle, Day 1._

A ragged American flag still fluttered over the building. Against the backdrop of thickening white clouds behind it, the flag looked almost transparent, its stars and stripes threadbare and bleached by decades of exposure. Yet somehow it still clung to a rusting flagpole at the top of the hotel, as much a ghost of a prior world as the building itself, with its ornate cornice along the roofline and long black and green stains of more than a century of weathering Seattle’s damp climate.

Everything about the place suggested a base or outpost. Three streets had once led to its front entrance, but two were now cordoned off by walls and a gate, giving the impression that the hotel had been converted to a guard tower set in one of the former quarantine zone’s interior walls. It commanded a lofty view of the one remaining street, which forced an approach to the hotel from a disadvantageous downhill slope, with only a few rusting cars for cover. An old bus and several RVs had been partially lined up across this last remaining street as well, wooden boards bolted to their fronts to form a barrier, with tarp canopies behind them providing a ramshackle shelter. A lone plastic chair sat atop the bus, unoccupied.

The building itself was a fortified complex as well, a square courtyard in front of it hemmed in by a tall wrought iron fence that bristled with coils of barbed wire across its top. More wooden boards had been bolted into place along every inch of the courtyard fence, permitting no entry. Tommy could see the body of a rusting Humvee in the courtyard, but even from this distance, it was clear the old military vehicle rested on its rims. It had been a long time since anything on wheels had driven through one of the courtyard’s three boarded up gates.

Still, the place had the appearance of having been maintained. Ivy climbed the wrought iron walls but had been cut away from the barbed wire along the top. Tall grass swayed gently around the edges of the courtyard, but the cobbles surrounding a small fountain at its center had been kept relatively clear of vegetation. And the plastic chair atop the bus still sat upright. It might have been unoccupied, but it seemed unlikely the flimsy thing would have survived more than a storm or two without toppling over with a good gust of wind.

Everything suggested an occupied base of operations. Except for the lack of occupants, of course.

Tommy bent his head to his scope again, peering through the magnified lens to scan the dusty windows of the hotel’s upper floors. He crouched at the windowsill of a small apartment that overlooked the bus and RVs that formed a makeshift barricade across the open road leading up to the Serevena. A tall madrone tree obscured part of his view, but it equally served to mask his own perch from view as well, so it would have to do.

He thought he had seen movement once, behind one of the unbroken windows high up at the center of the hotel’s L-shaped design. But it had been brief enough to doubt, and the morning sun had been glinting deceptively across the glass panes as it struck them almost head on. He had seen nothing since.

Tommy felt a twinge of irritation. He was capable of being incredibly patient. He had sat in perches like this a thousand times before, watching, waiting. As a white-tailed buck slowly picked its way towards a clearing for an open shot. As a FEDRA patrol approached along a ruined highway. As a ragged woman stepped out from a storefront, a half-empty backpack and new pair of boots forming the temptation that would be her doom. For good or for ill, decades of hunting had taught Tommy the restraint necessary to sit in a single place for a very, very long time.

But this was different. A restive agitation roiled through him. The feeling had started with the first sight of the wolf’s head banner and had only grown as he neared the place once called Serevena Hotel. And it was turning to irritation now. There was no survival at stake here, no cause for the greater good. This was personal.

And they weren’t here.

The enormous wolf’s head seemed to leer mockingly at him from across the street.

The crosshairs of the rifle’s scope slid from window to window, sharpening on dusty glass panels and the gaping black holes behind windows that had been broken. Several had the telltale pattern of spiderwebbed cracks spreading out from a bullet hole. Many had simply been boarded over with wood from within.

Beneath his irritation, another, as yet unacknowledged, part of him was beginning to tense with the thought of returning to Jackson empty-handed. Returning was going to be bad enough. He had carefully avoided thinking about what Maria would say, what Ellie would say at the fact that he had lied to them and left them behind. It would not be pleasant, and Ellie in particular was unlikely to forgive him. But returning with the news that _they_ were dead, that _she_ was dead, would go some way towards assuaging the worst of it. It had to. Then at least he could tell them that it had been justified, could tell himself that it had been justified. Returning empty-handed, however—

He saw movement.

Tommy was certain of it this time. A figure, darkish and distorted by the reflection of the morning sun, but indisputably moving behind one of the unbroken windows near the top of the building. He had seen it only for a second. The movement had been smooth and deliberate, not the erratic stumbling or jerking of an infected. He focused the scope on the window again, watching for further movement. The figure did not reappear, but Tommy’s pulse beat rapidly as he involuntarily held his breath.

A few seconds later, a shout from the hotel made his whole body go rigid with a rush of anticipation. Someone was here. He could not make out the words, but it was a woman’s voice, echoing across the short distance between his apartment hideout and the hotel. He lifted his head from the rifle’s scope, peering across the walled courtyard, scanning the rows of windows.

She appeared at the hotel’s front entrance. A tall, narrow woman with dark skin, hair pulled up under a faded green field cap, the sleeves of her gray shirt rolled up in no-nonsense fashion. Tommy could see a pistol on her left hip. Some absurd part of him slumped inwardly at the fact that her profile was not the thick bull of a woman who had haunted his dreams, but he brushed the disappointment away, the rational part of his mind hardly having expected the first person he encountered in Seattle to be _her_.

The woman crossed the hotel’s courtyard, gesturing behind her as if speaking to someone else still in the building’s lobby. She stopped at a length of the wrought iron fence where the barbed wire had come down and pulled herself up and over, dropping to a rusting dumpster that squatted on the outside of the makeshift wall.

Tommy’s brows drew together, briefly debating whether to follow her or remain watching the hotel, but she did not go far, approaching the closed gate and stopping to kneel beside a large military generator there. A moment later, the generator roared to life.

“Jesus Christ,” Tommy breathed out through his teeth.

They still used the gates. They still had gas to open the gates. That took coordination. Either someone somewhere was still drilling, or they at least had a salvage operation capable of recovering significant quantities of useable gas from a dwindling number of rusting vehicles and storage tanks. The odds of this being some random woman or a random group of survivors had just shrunk. By a lot.

As Tommy watched, the woman crossed the road and approached the gate itself, and then his breath caught. A truck had trundled into view behind the gate’s steel bars, the sound of its engine drowned out by the growl of the generator. Tommy instantly bent to his rifle’s scope again, feeling his fingers start to tremble. The crosshairs swam into focus a moment later and he could see the truck in detail, a standard military small troop carrier, the FEDRA logo across its flanks spray-painted over with a blocky white _WLF_.

“There you are, you bastards,” he muttered, jaw tightening.

The gate slid open with a clatter and grind of rusting joints. Tommy could see two figures in the cab of the truck as it pulled through and idled to a stop beside the Serevena’s wall. Three others sat on benches in the open bed of the truck. They wore the same faded colors as the woman, gray and green and tan, cloth field caps shadowing their faces. Young faces. Young faces in drab clothing approximating something like a military uniform, with a spray-painted emblem across a FEDRA truck’s sides. It could have been Tommy, but for the wrong emblem and the passage of nearly two decades.

The truck’s doors opened as the woman approached it and the two figures in the cab stepped out. The driver, a man in a dark beanie, waved at the woman, then hooked a thumb back towards the three men in the back of the truck, appearing to laugh as he did so. The woman’s head cocked at an angle as she said something in reply and the truck’s passengers became animated with sudden laughter and mock gestures of offense.

Tommy could almost hear them. Not really, not audibly. But the inane back and forth sarcasm and ribbing and bravado, the comradely digs about who was the better shot or better drinker or better lover. They were so familiar that he could all but hear the jeers and laughter, despite the distance and the drowning roar of the gate’s generator.

Movement caught his attention and he lifted his gaze from the scope again, just in time to see more drab-clad young faces emerging from the front of the hotel. Two, then three, then four. Most were carrying backpacks, several had long guns slung over one shoulder. Like the woman, they vaulted the compound’s wrought iron wall at the point where the barbed wire had been cut away, landing on the dumpster outside.

Five new arrivals. And five emerging as if packed to leave. Okay then. A shift change. This was indeed a guarded outpost then, even if the hotel’s manpower seemed paltry for what a place of this size could accommodate.

The two groups blended for a moment, some clambering out of the truck’s bed, others clambering into it. Backpacks and rifles hefted over shoulders or thrust into the truck’s cab. Palms slapped and fists bumped. The man with the dark beanie gestured towards the Serevena at one point, then nodded as if having asked a question and received an answer.

Bending to the scope again, Tommy tried to focus on the faces of the outgoing and incoming soldiers, tried to discern details that might tie any of them to the group who had come to Jackson. But though a solid head shot would have been easy at this distance, making out anything more than approximate facial features was not. Tommy had always preferred a sniper’s perch for that very reason. You could be deadly accurate, but you saw little of your target at close range, their form more like an unreal model of a human being than a living, breathing person.

The woman and the four others who had emerged from the hotel were piling into the truck now, and their replacements had started clambering over the dumpster and dropping to the courtyard below. Tommy glimpsed a hunting rifle on one of the replacements, a shorter carbine rifle on another. A second later, the truck had heaved forward and turned a sharp U in the street, disappearing back through the gate by which it had come. The man in the dark beanie lingered beside the gate a moment longer than the others, watching as the rusting steel bars grated close, then he too disappeared into the hotel.

Tommy waited.

Weeks on the road from Jackson to Seattle had given Tommy plenty of time to plan his infiltration of the zone. He did not know the city itself and his knowledge of the Washington Liberation Front was more than a decade out of date. He was also a single player amidst what could feasibly still be a very vibrant militia group. Success would depend on patience. Watching and waiting, unseen, unsuspected. Infiltration if the opportunity presented itself. Striking only where the numbers and layout would give advantage to a single operative.

He had the confirmation he needed. The hotel was occupied, and by a trivial force no less. He was reasonably certain no others had stayed behind in the building. Any larger detachment would have been more visible – more glimpses of passing figures in the windows, more guards patrolling the courtyard. It made little sense that a complex so clearly built out for fortification by a larger force would be occupied now by only a skeleton crew, but perhaps the WLF had seen its one-time strength wither away. Regardless, he would take advantage of the weakness while he could.

Half an hour passed before he allowed himself to move. He retreated from his window perch, slinging his rifle over one shoulder and taking the stairs to the ground floor at a quick trot. The front entrance of the small apartment building opened out onto the street leading to the Serevena, but he had entered via a back door, where the building itself shielded him from view of the hotel. He slipped back out through the same rusting metal door, gently pushing through clusters of laurel and huckleberry that had overgrown the rear exit and small alley that ran behind the building.

A soft knicker greeted him as the bushes gave way to tall grass.

“Shh shh shh,” Tommy hushed fondly, reaching out to stroke the nose of the dun-colored horse who waited for him, reins wrapped lightly around a rusting bike rack.

Chisholm whickered again, velvet muzzle pressing at Tommy’s hand, lips lightly brushing over his fingers as the horse searched for some offering.

Tommy chuckled softly. “Knock it off, asshole,” he smiled, pressing a cheek to the horse’s forehead and rubbing beneath the animal’s chin. “You got grass here so tall you don’t even got to bend down. Don’t act like you’re starvin’, mister.”

Chisholm gave him the long-suffering stare that only horses have mastered so well.

“Yeah, good boy,” Tommy said, fingers still gently rubbing beneath the horse’s chin. “You just hang tight here for a while, okay? I got some business I gotta take care of.”

He swung his pack off his shoulder and looped one of its straps over the horn of the saddle on Chisholm’s back. The horse bent placidly to rip at the tall grass again as Tommy checked the reins he had previously slung over the old bike rack. They were wound tightly enough around the rusting metal to keep Chisholm from wandering, but not so tightly as to prevent the horse from pulling away if infected or other threats came too near.

Then he checked himself. A full magazine in the rifle, two spares in his right coat pocket. The familiar press of the .45 in his back waistband, a spare magazine in his left pocket. A short black Bowie machete hanging from one side of his belt. He swung the rifle off his shoulder for a second, quickly adjusting the scope to account for a smaller distance than the vantage point he had just come down from.

“Okay,” he said quietly to himself.

Patting Chisholm’s shoulder, Tommy bid the horse farewell and began creeping along the side of the small apartment building, keeping to the shadows and bushes where possible. He cradled his hunting rifle across his chest, the stock resting on his forearm for easy bracing against his shoulder should the need arise.

As he inched around the building’s corner and peered out at the street leading to the Serevena, he felt the drumming in his chest slow and the tremble in his fingers give way to a calm like water settling in a tub. Cold control wrapped around him for the first time in hours, chasing away the agitation that had pricked at his patience just minutes before. With action, his restiveness had abated.

He picked his way up the street slowly, using shadows and sightlines and the glare of the morning sun behind him to obscure his approach as much as possible. Like the soldiers who had departed, this new contingent of WLF had not posted a guard atop the makeshift wall formed by the bus and RV, nor had they left any of their number in the courtyard. One of them had appeared periodically in the front entrance, idly sauntering from the hotel’s open double doors into the building’s lobby and back again, on some half-assed kind of patrol. Occasionally a figure had moved behind one of the windows on the upper floors. But the watchfulness of the hotel’s guard force was distracted at best and Tommy had sensed they were more concerned about a possible approach by infected than anything else.

Still, he took no chances as he crept forward. He watched the windows of the hotel above him and paused frequently to listen for indications that his approach had been noticed. But he heard no shouts of alarm or rattle of weapons as of someone running to take up a defensive position. By the time he reached the rusting dumpster beneath the Serevena’s wrought iron fence, he was confident he had not been spotted. Nonetheless, as he gingerly pulled himself up onto the dumpster and peered up at the section of barbed wire that had been cut away from the top of the wall, he pressed himself close against the ironworks, hugging the cover afforded by the wooden boards nailed across the fence.

He heard voices at last. Distant, muffled. Two people. Male. Tone relaxed, conversational. Tommy tensed and he fought the sudden rush that surged through him. He shifted and slowly raised the stock of his rifle above him as he crouched, letting the butt rise by inches above the top of the iron fence, where anyone paying attention in the courtyard would see it.

Nothing.

Swallowing, Tommy drew a shallow breath to steady himself, then peered over the top of the fence into the courtyard.

Nothing.

Without waiting for further confirmation, he grasped the top of the wall and hoisted himself swiftly up and over.

He dropped into tall grass. By instinct, he instantly lowered himself to a crouch, feeling his bad left knee click predictably in protest. The grass nearest the wall came comfortably over his head, but he could peer through the thick green blades well enough to tell that the front entrance to the old hotel remained unguarded.

His breathing felt impossibly loud as he crept forward, and the whisper of the grass as he pressed through it made his jaw clench. But he kept to the tallest grass along the wall and at the foot of the building, picking his way past climbing ivy and elaborate stone sculptures of fish and seahorses and shells that adorned the hotel’s façade. As he neared the main entrance, he slowed, listening as the two male voices grew louder, echoing from within the open double doors.

Taking a deep breath, Tommy darted forward and pressed himself against the stone façade directly adjacent to the open entryway.

He could discern words in the two men’s voices now.

“—only want the gas. We’re not packin’ everything else up. Relax. We’ll be back.”

“It’s just kinda shitty, man,” came a second voice, this one looser, more adolescent. “I mean sure, take the gas, that’s fine. That’s what it’s here for. But why the hell abandon the Serevena as well?”

“We’re _not_ abandoning it,” the first man replied, tone sharpening. “Just get that shit out of your head, okay kid? They’ve got a plan and this side of the city’s been quiet for months. Just reprioritizin’ right now, that’s all.”

Tommy heard distracted footsteps idly making their way back towards the double doors where he crouched.

“Reprioritizing for what?” asked the second, younger man. The voice was closer to the hotel’s entry now. Tommy pressed himself against the stonework, holding his breath.

“Hell if I know,” the first man scoffed. “They’re gettin’ everyone up to the FOB though. Nick thinks we might be makin’ another push at the Scars.”

The footsteps stopped abruptly and Tommy heard the scuff of boots, as if the younger man nearly to the front entrance had turned to look back towards the lobby.

“No shit?” the younger man said, voice rising with an edge of hope. “Like finally getting those nuts off the mainland?”

“Maybe. That’s what Nick thinks anyway, and he’d know better’n you or me.”

The footsteps began moving away from Tommy again, their movement more animated now. Some of the tension in Tommy’s shoulders eased slightly and he let himself draw a quiet breath again.

“Well shit,” came the younger man’s voice again, retreating back into the lobby. “That’d almost be worth abandoning this place for then. _Not that we’re abandoning it_ ,” he added cutely, a clear grin in his tone as if his comrade had shot him a reproachful look.

The first man snorted and sighed. “Whatever man. I’m gonna go check on Nick and the others, see how they’re gettin’ on. Then do another sweep upstairs. Mike’s crew should be here in less than an hour, so keep an eye out for ‘em.”

“Okay.”

More footsteps. Deliberate motion now, not idle patrolling. He heard a door creak and open.

He waited, slowly counting to 30 in his head. Long enough for the first man to disappear upstairs as he had said he planned to do, short enough for the second man not to return to the front entrance as part of whatever patrol circuit he was idly walking.

Then, in one fluid motion, Tommy stood up from his crouched hiding spot, stepped into the open entryway, and couched the butt of his rifle against his shoulder.

He took in the scene in the lobby in an instant. Scuffed wooden floors and fading rugs. Leaves and other detritus strewn across the ground. Military crates alongside old luggage carts. Wood paneling, wood columns, wood coffee tables. A former luxury now faded and dried out like the rest of the world. At the center of the lobby stood a massive wooden pillar surrounded by dusty cushioned benches and several filthy lounge chairs.

A young man stood in front of the pillar, staring straight at Tommy. The man seemed frozen in place, eyes wide, lips slightly parted as if confused by Tommy’s sudden, silent appearance. An old, bolt action rifle was propped against one of the cushioned benches beside him.

“Hey there,” Tommy said tightly, staring down the barrel of his rifle as he slowly entered the lobby. He tried to find a tone somewhere between calm and threatening.

The young man almost flinched at Tommy’s greeting, but he licked his lips and swallowed. “Hey,” he replied, quietly, cautiously, almost a question.

Tommy’s eyes were adjusting now to the dim light of the hotel’s interior and he could make out a cavernous space beyond the entryway, a pair of open doors to his right, something like a reception area to his left. He shook his head when the young man’s eyes darted down for a second, in the direction of the old rifle propped up near the man’s foot.

“Ah ah,” Tommy cautioned. “I don’t think so. Keep your hands where I can see ‘em. I just wanna talk.”

The young man replied slowly, still tensed like a deer in the headlights. “Okay…What about?”

“I’m lookin’ for someone. Someone I think might be with your outfit.” He kept his cheek pressed against the side of his rifle, only his lips moving as he continued advancing on the young man.

“You’re gonna have to be more sp—”

“Jonathan?”

Several things happened at once. As a man stepped through the open doors on Tommy’s right, Tommy instantly recognized the voice of the older man who had said he was going upstairs. He was not looking at Tommy, as if yet to realize his younger friend, named Jonathan apparently, was no longer alone in the lobby. In the same instant, Jonathan twisted downward, snatching at the rifle propped beside him. And a fraction of a second later, Tommy squeezed off a single shot.

Jonathan bucked backwards, clutching at his stomach and doubling over. He fell back against one of the dirty lounge chairs with a cry.

“Jesus fu—” the older man suddenly yelled, not even bothering to finish his own expletive as he caught sight of Tommy and swung to face him.

“Carter, run!” Jonathan had collapsed against the faded cushions of the one of benches behind him, but he gathered enough strength now as he slid to the floor to holler a warning at his friend.

And Carter heeded it, spinning on his heel to flee through the open double doors again, even as he tried to swing the rifle he had been carrying off his shoulder.

Tommy shot him in the back. The man stumbled in front of the open doors, a spray of blood scattering across the floor at his feet. He lurched forward through the doors a few more paces, already starting to list headlong as if to fall, then Tommy shot him a second time, center mass in the back, just like the first. Carter flopped to the ground and did not move.

In front of Tommy, Jonathan sputtered, blood spitting up over his lips and chin as he clutched uselessly at the hole in his abdomen, his hands growing slick with blood and gore. Somewhere, some part of Tommy wanted to recoil at the sight of a kid who could not have been more than eighteen gurgling to death on his own blood, but for now, Tommy felt only impatient irritation at the little shit’s stupidity.

Jonathan looked up as Tommy came to stand over him, still staring down the barrel of his rifle. The kid’s face was olive-skinned beneath the drab green field cap, eyes dark and pleading.

“Please,” he moaned, coughing blood.

Tommy scowled. “That was stupid, kid.”

He shot him at the base of the throat. Jonathan’s body spasmed for a moment, then the younger man’s head sagged forward and he stilled.

Tommy stared for a second, then shook his head sharply. “Fuck!” he hissed to himself. The situation was not impossible, but his plan to quietly stalk and bind the building’s five occupants to determine if any of them had relevant information had just gone to hell. The best he could hope for now was to find the remaining three and hope he could keep one or two of them alive for questioning.

Floorboards creaked on the floor above him and Tommy heard hushed voices muffled through the ceiling. At least two more on the second floor then.

He lowered his rifle an inch as he moved through the double doors that the man named Carter had tried to flee through. Carter’s body lay in a foyer-like area at the foot of a set of wooden stairs leading up. The WLF soldier had fallen forward and sprawled face first on the wooden floor, a pool of blood already seeping from exit wounds onto the ground beneath the dead man’s chest.

The glass panels on one of the double doors were broken, leaving gaping holes that would easily permit entry by another human reaching through, but he closed the doors nonetheless and thrust a short length of pipe he found through the handles. Any infected who had heard the gunshots at least would not be able to make their way upstairs.

Coming to stand beside the body, Tommy stooped and retrieved the rifle that Carter still held, unused, in one hand. It was some kind of semi-automatic carbine, a model resembling an AK-47 that Tommy did not recognize, with a 10-round magazine and a fire selector that appeared to allow for burst fire. He popped the magazine out to check that it was full, then shouldered his own long gun in favor of this one. His rifle was a hunter’s tool. This bastard was for street fighting.

Opposite the stairs leading up was a door that opened into a breakroom area and supply storage. Tommy checked both were empty before returning to the foyer with Carter’s body. As he did so, he heard a creak upstairs again, this time nearer, almost as if in the same room.

He saw the outstretched pistol before he saw the man holding it. It protruded from between two balusters of the stairway banister just above the landing where the stairs turned back in a U shape to the second floor. The muzzle flashed a fraction of a second after Tommy spotted it, his boot already on the first step leading up. He lurched away as the crack of the pistol filled the tight space and chunks of plaster sprayed from the wall behind him. Something hot and screaming skipped across the outside of his left elbow as he dove out of his assailant’s line of sight, but he barely processed it as he heard footsteps pounding back up the stairs above him and he gave chase, pulling himself up the stairs two at a time.

As he hit the landing and spun to his first glimpse of the second floor, he saw the man above him turn beside a doorway at the top of the stairs, pistol lifting to fire behind him once more. Tommy whipped the semi-automatic rifle up and squeezed the trigger, feeling the gun buck against him three times in quick succession.

Plaster exploded beside the other man’s leg as the kick-back from the unfamiliar weapon skewed Tommy’s aim. He squeezed the trigger again, crouching and using the angle of the stairs for cover. The first shot from the burst flew wide again, but the second two took the man square in the chest with fleshy thuds and sprays of blood out the back.

The man staggered backwards and struck the peeling plaster wall behind him, still trying weakly to lift his pistol in Tommy’s direction. Tommy fired once more, all but emptying the rifle’s clip as the other man slumped and slid to the floor, dead before he hit the carpet.

Tommy was cautious as he came the remainder of the way up the stairs, still staring down the rifle’s iron sights, keenly aware he had only one more round in the gun. Every muscle in his body sang with tension and adrenaline as he scanned the hallway at the top of the stairs and the open doorway straight ahead that appeared to lead into a former guestroom. The hallway to his left was blocked by a pair of double doors and the bulky forms of furniture beneath dirty sheets, while the hallway to his right was stacked with various boxes and crates that could have afforded ample cover to anyone who wanted to attack him in the open here at the top of the staircase. But he saw no movement in the hallway and a quick look into the guestroom revealed no occupants.

Satisfied he was not in immediate danger for the next second or two, Tommy turned and chucked the nearly empty semi-automatic rifle behind the sheet-covered furniture and drew forth instead the .45 pistol from his waistband. He preferred the power and precision of his hunting rifle, but it was a hindrance in close quarters like this, where every door and corner could hide a lurking enemy and a long gun required twice the time to swing in the proper direction.

He hesitated a moment, listening for any sound, the creak of floorboards again, the muffle of hushed voices. But he heard nothing this time. Three down, two left. And at this point, they had to know the gunshots they had heard had not been accidental or to dispatch infected. They had to know they were hunted.

Lifting the .45, Tommy slowly made his way down the hallway. His teeth were clenched, finger on the trigger, breathing short and deliberate. A dim red light spilled across the carpet’s garish pattern from an open doorway to his right. As he neared it, something in the quality of the light changed. Almost imperceptible, something that lizard part of the brain notices more than conscious awareness. A slight shifting, as of something just barely moving in front of the light.

He was almost holding his breath. Sweat beaded across his brow, and he could feel a hot throb beginning to emanate from his elbow wherever the man on the stairs had nicked him. But he moved as silently as he could, willing the floorboards beneath his feet to keeping from whining or creaking.

A side table in the hallway was covered in dust and forgotten items. A phone. A lamp. A stack of books. An empty glass bottle. Tommy paused, plucking the bottle up from the tabletop and holding it by its neck.

Lowering his pistol, he edged right up next to the open door with the red light, keeping out of its line of sight. Then he took a deep breath, snaked his hand around the edge of the doorframe, and chucked the bottle into the room.

The glass thumped loudly across a wooden floor within, and as it did so Tommy peeled away from the wall in one fluid motion, raised his pistol, and stepped into the open doorway.

A man. Standing behind a white table. Red curtains. Young face. Mousy brown hair. Eyes angled just to the side, following the rolling bottle. A pistol. Pointing straight at him.

Tommy fired.

Even in the split second he had, he remembered to aim deliberately low, avoiding the man’s head or center mass. The bullet struck the man in the front of his hip, just above the left leg. The man had been standing, waiting, behind a long table with a white tablecloth pushed up against the wall nearest the door. Now, however, he doubled over, crying out as he fell against the edge of the table, his pistol clattering across the white cloth as he clutched at his wound.

Heart pounding, Tommy moved into the room quickly, intent on grabbing the man’s pistol away from him before he could recover.

Too late, Tommy realized his mistake. As he passed the threshold of the door, .45 still held out and ready, something moved behind the door. Tommy glimpsed the head of a claw hammer, another man’s fingers wrapped around the handle, before the hammer crashed across the top of his hand. A jolt of pain spasmed through his thumb and forefinger, instantly numbing them as his brain geared itself up to process and fully embrace the pain of the sudden trauma. The .45 flew from his grasp and hit the floor, spinning away.

Instinct alone drove Tommy’s left elbow into the gut of his unknown assailant behind the door. The other man grunted as Tommy’s elbow connected, and Tommy grabbed at the head of the claw hammer to jerk it out of the other man’s grasp. For an instant, they struggled, each pulling at one end of the hammer, and Tommy glimpsed the dark beanie worn by the truck’s driver he had seen pull up outside the hotel.

Finally, with a growl Tommy wrenched the hammer free from his attacker, feeling the curved claws of the hammer head slice into his palm deep enough to draw blood. He bulled forward with a shout, bodily driving the other man back against the table. The other man struck the table’s edge with a gasp and Tommy lashed out with the hammer, wielding it upside down, still clutching the head like a pummel rather than swinging the tool as it was designed to be used. The flat face of the hammer struck the man across the left side of his head, drawing a dark splotch beneath the material of the beanie. The man’s eyes immediately unfocused.

Tommy paused, swallowing. He still held his elbow against the other man’s chest, pinning him against the table. Something ticked at the back of Tommy’s mind as he glanced at the man’s face, something that pricked at his consciousness through the adrenaline and pain and instinct of action.

But movement across the table refocused him abruptly. The young man with the mousy brown hair, the man Tommy had shot, was pushing himself up from the table where he had fallen against it. He was limply reaching out for the pistol he had let clatter uselessly across the table’s surface.

Scowling in irritation at the younger man’s gall, Tommy snatched up the dropped pistol from the tablecloth. He glanced back at the man in the beanie, whose eyes were still rolling with blurry focus. Jaw clenching, Tommy slammed the pistol across the side of the man’s head, whipping his face around and causing his eyes to roll full back into his skull now. Tommy released him and the man crumpled forward onto the wooden floor, unconscious.

Tommy was breathing hard now, but the adrenaline was beginning to slow as it became increasingly clear he had gained control of the room. Popping the magazine from the pistol and ejecting the round in the chamber, he threw the empty piece to the table with mounting impatience. The mousy-haired young man’s expression twisted with a mix of hatred and pained pleading as he stared up at Tommy.

Several rolling wooden chairs surrounded the table and Tommy grabbed the man and shoved him backwards into one. He grimaced suddenly as he did so, lifting his hand and noting for the first time the two bloody squares that had been flayed from his palm by the blades of the claw hammer. Lines of blood ran down across his fingers.

“What do you want?” groaned the young man in the chair, pressing the sleeve of one arm against the gunshot wound quickly soaking the fabric above his left leg. Like the others, he was almost too young for Tommy to think of as a man, though he had the high brow and thinning hair of someone likely to be bald before 30. But he was thin and gangly and smooth-faced, still practically growing into his bones.

“Shut up,” Tommy muttered, wiping his bloody fingers across his pants leg.

“Who the fuck _are_ you?”

Tommy did not answer this time. He was assessing the room, content for the moment that the man in the beanie was out cold on the floor and the kid in the chair was going nowhere with a bullet in the hip. The room was bigger than Tommy had realized, the drawn curtains and peeling, salmon-colored walls giving it a rich warmth that suggested a cozier setting. A conference room, he guessed, noting how the table with the white tablecloth ran nearly the length of the room and was surrounded by yet more of the rolling wooden chairs.

His eyes came to rest again on the man in the beanie, still crumpled unconscious near the door. Something ticked at the back of Tommy’s mind again. Something shifted in his stomach.

Anticipation.

The man had collapsed forward, onto his face, though Tommy could see a dark stain had soaked the side of the man’s beanie and blood had begun to run out from beneath the hat, across the man’s temple. Crossing the room and kneeling, Tommy flipped the man onto his back.

His breath caught.

The face. Long and broad. Asian in origin, Japanese American maybe. The faint, slanted scar beneath one eye. The whisper of dark facial hair across the upper lip and chin.

The face of a man distorted by memory and nightmare, real again.

Tommy could almost feel the man’s fingers wrapped around his wrist again, around his arm, pinning him back against the bar top, pressing him down against the cold surface.

Cold fury shot through him.

“What’s his name?” Tommy said tightly, not looking up.

The kid in the chair across the table shifted, still hunched over the bloody hole in his hip. “Man, fuck you—”

“ _What is his fucking name?_ ” Tommy snapped, his anger vicious and sudden and terribly in control as he wheeled to look at the young man.

“N-Nick,” the kid stammered, flinching. “Nick. Fuck’s sake. His name’s Nick. What the fuck’s it to you?”


End file.
